Book: Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin

A beautifully crafted tale about a prep-school rowing team, as it happened in their senior year and in the events leading up to their 15-year reunion. 

Rob is the protagonist and this is mostly his story. Because he came from working class parents, the only reason he ended up at Fenton was because he was an outstanding rower in high-school. He had learned and excelled in a single-man skull, but at Fenton, he to row with three others in a four-man crew known as the God Four. The team had lost to Warwick four years in a row. Connor Payne was another crew member, and the author creates an exquisite tension between Connor and Rob. Both are extraordinary athletes but worlds apart socially. Both are young men in their physical prime, on the brink of adulthood. This is a fifth year of high-school, a preparatory year for college. The Ivy Leagues are next for many of them. 

Connor's parents drove to the Warwick-Fenton race the previous year in a limousine with tinted windows, parked near the end of the race and left without getting out of the car when Fenton lost. Such was his burden. 

And there is Ruth, the coxswain for this crew, tough and smart, and the first female cox in Fenton's history. 

Alternating with this year on the water is Rob's subsequent career as a documentary filmmaker for National Geographic. He lives with his girlfriend in New York City works out of the country much of the time and is in Cape Town, South Africa, when he receives a letter from John Perry, another of his former crew-mates. They have not been in contact but Perry is writing as a newly sober man, in rehab, wanting to connect,  He says, "I battled to write this, wondered if I even have a right to say anything at all to you about that year, even if you are reading this letter in some rainforest or whatever. But for what it's worth, here it is: Make peace with the past. Figure it out.…Fifteen years, Rob. Sitting here in his room, it feels like two minutes ago we were gods." 

Michael Koryta, a New York Times bestselling author says this novel "...is the best debut novel I've read this year…an original and powerful work. I'll read anything Irwin writes after this. "