Many Waters was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1986. For the first time in the Time Quintet, the protagonists are not Meg or Charles Wallace but the “ordinary” Murry twins, Sandy and Dennys — fifteen-year-old boys who have no special gifts beyond being athletic and practical. They accidentally activate their father’s computer experiment and are transported to a desert landscape that turns out to be the pre-diluvian world of Noah.
The twins encounter miniature mammoths, a young Noah (Lamech’s son, not yet old), and two orders of supernatural beings: the seraphim (angels who remained faithful) and the nephilim (those who “fell” — who took human wives and fathered giants). Both orders can shift between human and animal form. The twins are separated — each sheltered by a different family — and must reunite and find a way home before the Flood.
L’Engle treats the Noah story not as allegory but as literal history within her fictional universe. The theological questions she raises — why God would destroy most of creation, what happened to the nephilim’s human children, whether Sandy and Dennys’s presence constitutes interference with divine plan — are addressed directly rather than evaded.
Collecting Many Waters
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1986): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first: $80–$150