The morning of June 23, 1972, I was standing shoulder to shoulder with thousands of volunteers, desperately stacking sandbags to hold back the raging Susquehanna River. I didn’t know it then, but that’s when I began writing this story.

 

CHEATING AGNES is historical fiction. Two disasters—the devastating Agnes Flood in 1972 and the COVID-19 pandemic—frame a working-poor boy’s loss of innocence and the writer he becomes while reckoning with the ghosts of his past.