"Hernan Diaz has written a tale that takes the familiar tropes of the Old West and puts them backwards, upside-down, reflects them in a mud puddle, and refracts them in a column of smoke. We end up with a slender and sparse narrative of radical foreignness, of belonging nowhere, of a world too big and yet too finite."
Publisher Coffee House Press
Publication Date 2017-10-10
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781566894883
Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
