Now I Surrender
A Novel
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4.7 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST AND LITHUB!
“This gifted Mexican writer … delivers novels that are steeped in history and have a hallucinatory sense of pageantry … He’s one of the best we have.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This three-part saga of the Apache Wars and the long shadow of imperialism constitutes a major work of historical reclamation from Enrigue (You Dreamed of Empires). It begins in 1836 in border hamlet Janos, where widow Camila Ezguerra is kidnapped from her ranch. On their trail is Lt. Col. José María Zuloaga, who's made a name for himself killing Apaches for the "fledgling republic of Mexico," along with a motley crew of conscripts. Enrigue alternates from their expedition to the 1886 surrender of Geronimo and its aftermath, with chapters from historical figures like President Grover Cleveland, frustrated that Geronimo wasn't caught before ("Our army is the biggest in the world," he tells his secretary of war) and Geronimo's revolutionary heir, Pancho Villa, who, in 1916, describes how he learned battlefield strategies from the elder's spirit. Threaded throughout is the author's record of a road trip he takes with his family in present-day America, stopping at such landmarks as Geronimo's tomb in Oklahoma, and hoping along the way to rediscover the history behind the genocide of the Americas. "Westerns," Enrigue writes in this urgent and painstakingly researched narrative, "are the fairy tales gringos tell themselves to assure the triumph of bureaucratic reason over the excesses of individual will." It's an eloquent rejoinder to the mythos that made two countries while erasing the lives of their original inhabitants.
