About this item
An unforgettable debut of linked stories that follow the members and retinue of a wealthy Mexican family forced into exile after the patriarch is kidnapped.On an unremarkable night, Jos Victoriano Arteaga - the head of a thriving Mexico City family - vanishes on his way home from work. The Arteagas find few answers; the full truth of what happened to Arteaga is lost to the shadows of Mexico's vast and desperate underworld, a place of rampant violence and kidnappings, and government corruption. But soon packages arrive to the family house, offering horrifying clues. Fear, guilt, and the prospect of financial ruination fracture the once-proud family and scatter them across the globe, yet delicate threads still hold them together: in a swimming pool in Palo Alto, Arteaga's young grandson struggles to make sense of the grief that has hobbled his family; in Mexico City, Arteaga's mistress alternates between rage and heartbreak as she waits, in growing panic, for her lover's return; in Austin, the Arteagas' housekeeper tries to piece together a second life in an alienating and demeaning new land; in Madrid, Arteaga's son takes his ailing dog through the hot and unforgiving streets, in search of his father's ghost.
About the Author
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho (Toluca, Mexico, 1973) is the author of BAREFOOT DOGS (Scribner) , also published in Spanish in translation by the author as LOS PERROS DESCALZOS (Vintage Español; Literatura Random House) , winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters 2015, Fiction Finalist at the 2015 Writers' League of Texas Book Awards, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015, a San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of 2015, one of Texas Observer's Five Books We Loved in 2015, and one of PRI's The World's Five Books You Should Read in 2016. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. A former John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University, a Dobie Paisano fellow in fiction by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, and a fiction fellow at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference and Yaddo, he earned his MFA from The New Writers Project at UT Austin. He lives in Austin with his family, where he's currently at work on a novel.
