Boston needs water. The engineers know where to find it. But four towns stand in their way ... Swift River is the tale of Polly McPhee, a native of Greenwich, a small central Massachusetts town condemned with three others in 1927 to create a permanent supply of clean water for the people of Boston. One of the most successful and cost-effective civil engineering projects in history, the Quabbin reservoir secured fresh water for millions by drowning the Swift River Valley, once home to the Nipmuc and then to generations of farmers, merchants, artisans, and mill workers. Over the course of this intimate yet far-reaching novel, Polly matures from a girl who sees the water project as an especially unfair phenomenon of an adult world that rarely makes sense to her anyway to a woman who understands that ultimately all of the past and all of our memories are drowned and erased from sight as surely as Greenwhich will be. As she discovers new sources of joy and suffers a series of profound personal losses, the project assumes an ever more complex and significant role in Polly's life and universe, ultimately becoming a dangerous but powerful ally in her path to survival and redemption.