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 Most Anticipated Books

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

Where US authors seeking to revise the myths of the West have often dialed up the bloodshed … Enrigue’s preferred twist is a wry strain of humor… [His] deft handling of his densely researched material shines here, as do his cheeky departures from the historical record… By jumping back and forth between the perspectives of Mexican and American characters—as well as the immigrant narrator, whose experience spans both countries—he brings their visions of the Apache enemy, along with their self-justifications, into unbearable tension with each other

4Columns

A thought-provoking meditation on defiance, defeat, and assimilation

Booklist

As with Enrigue’s earlier books, he’s determined to upset narrative convention, and Wimmer, his longtime translator, handles his veering skillfully. Enrigue’s approach isn’t so much to lament the end of Apachería so much as to admire the steeliness of a tribe that survived centuries-long attempts to subdue it. A curious but effective treatment of an underappreciated effort to resist imperialism

Kirkus

It’s refreshing to read the work of an author unafraid to challenge readers with an adventure that is as brainy as it is fun… it’s a treat for patient readers who love historical fiction

Book Page

[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

So original and funny… with Enrigue living between worlds—the worlds of the past and the present, but also of the real and the imagined

The New Yorker

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 novel that roams fearlessly across styles, eras and countries, one of Mexico’s outstanding storytellers

Financial Times, Best summer books of 2026