Now I Surrender

Álvaro Enrigue is a contemporary master of historical fiction and his new book continues his complex explorations of colonialism in the Americas

LitHub

A baroque and semi-comic anti-Western... You can sense a bit of Bolaño in Enrigue: the postmodern playfulness, the cosmopolitanism, the historical conscience. Enrigue’s new one has a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian... He’s one of the best we have, and he’s not done pushing against conventions

New York Times

Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country… It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge

Los Angeles Times

Offer[s] the satisfactions of Westerns, historical epics, and metafiction even as [Enrigue] overturns all three traditions... Enrigue is an erudite, charismatic raconteur... and his novel distills a byzantine swirl of historical events through the lives of a handful of very colorful characters

Carolina A Miranda, The Atlantic

A kind of cubist Western, snarling convenient cultural narratives from a dizzying array of eras and perspectives

NPR

Simply no one is writing today like Álvaro Enrigue (and credit as well to his longtime translator, Natasha Wimmer)… It’s a mesmerizing read, and one that invites readers to learn about Apachería and unpack widely-held misconceptions about American history

Town & Country

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

Few authors are as ambitious as Enrigue, and his latest is further proof. Part epic and part alternative Western, Now I Surrender takes precise aim at the lies that the nation is built upon

Chicago Review of Books

In treating the details of war and conquest as symbolic playthings, Enrigue brings to mind authors such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut – and of course, Thomas Pynchon

Boris Kachka, The Atlantic

By turns an impassioned anti-imperialist lament, a gripping alt-western, a meditation on human freedom, an autofictional travelogue... [Enrique] slowly binds the narrative threads tighter and tighter... revealing the pulsating truth at the heart of his book. For all that it might be the incarcerated Apaches who are at the sharp end of this tragedy, the forces that apparently necessitated their demise... have, Enrigue suggests, denied us all the chance of achieving the highest forms of human flourishing

TLS

A thrillingly alive account… Enrigue recasts the so-called story of how the west was won, stripping it of the cultural shibboleths that have long dominated the discourse

Financial Times