A women's desperate flight from an Apache raid unfolds into a sweeping tale of the Mexico–US border war.

Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of charactersm 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.

Story Locale:US-Mexico borderlands in the second half of the 19th century and the present day
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
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.

Natasha Wimmer’s translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires and Sudden Death and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Author Residence: New York City

Author Hometown: Mexico City