A woman's desperate flight from an Apache raid unfolds into a sweeping tale of the Mexico–US border wars.
Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, Now I Surrender radically recasts the story of how the West was "won." In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband's ranch. A lieutenant colonel in service to the fledgling Republic, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, discovers he's on the trail of a more dramatic abduction. Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to maneuver Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. In our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.
Part epic, part alt-Western, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue's most expansive and impassioned novel yet. It weaves past and present, myth and history into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty—and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.
"A major work of historical reclamation...an eloquent rejoinder to the mythos that made two countries while erasing the lives of their original inhabitants." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"As with Enrigue's earlier books, he's determined to upset narrative convention, and Wimmer, his longtime translator, handles his veering skillfully. Enrigue's approach isn't so much to lament the end of Apachería so much as to admire the steeliness of a tribe that survived centuries-long attempts to subdue it. A curious but effective treatment of an underappreciated effort to resist imperialism." —Kirkus Reviews
"A thought-provoking meditation on defiance, defeat, and assimilation." —Booklist
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Álvaro Enrigue is a prize-winning Mexican writer whose most recent novel is You Dreamed of Empires. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, El País, and n+1, among other publications. A former Fellow at the Cullman Center and at Princeton University, he teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University and lives with his family in New York City.

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