Now I Surrender

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

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

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

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

The Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue has a flair for bringing historical figures to life in fresh, unforgettable ways... a celebration of Apache defiance and resistance

LitHub

[A] masterpiece. . . A collage of archival research, field diaries, film criticism, travelogues, nature writing, and narrative history that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, Enrigue’s book accomplishes a nearly impossible feat: It succeeds equally well as a breathtaking historical novel and as a groundbreaking work of political theory. . . Against the savagery of imperialism, Now I Surrender offers the nobility of statelessness

The Nation

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

NPR

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

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