In the pine woods of East Texas, the cicadas come every thirteen years. They emerge from the ground where they have waited in the dark, and they climb the trees, and they split their skins, and they sing.
Mark Branch is thirteen the first time he hears them. Thirteen when he meets Tim Foster, who becomes the closest thing to a brother he will ever have. Thirteen when Terry Sanders moves to Beulah with her dark hair and her quiet opinions about Hemingway and theology and the proper way to fish a creek. Together they claim Murvaul Creek (the pool below the riffle where the water turns the color of strong tea) and for one summer the creek belongs to them. But Danny Cates has decided that Terry belongs to him, and Danny does not stop. And when the summer ends and Tim goes home on a highway that should have been safe, everything Mark has built around the creek breaks apart.
Thirteen years pass. Mark leaves Beulah, studies, becomes a pastor, and carries the silence like a shell: empty and perfect as the past. The cicadas do their slow invisible work underground. And when they emerge again, Mark returns to the creek, to the woman who has been waiting on her porch with cold coffee and a second chair, and to the question of whether what waits in the dark can survive the long wait for the light.
Every Thirteen Years is a novel about the sacred ordinary, about creek water and friendship and the way grief settles into a place like sediment. It is about East Texas, and about the particular mercy of a second arrival.
