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Now I Surrender

A visionary Western from the author of You Dreamed of Empires

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Now I Surrender

Written by: Álvaro Enrigue, Natasha Wimmer - translator
Narrated by: Thom Rivera
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Brought to you by Penguin.

Once I moved like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.

The darkly funny and action-packed story of Geronimo and how the American West was 'won'

A New York Times What to Read selection for 2026

In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a Mexican woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. Meanwhile, a lieutenant colonel of the fledgling Republic, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, will soon discover he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction.

Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to manoeuvre Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. And in our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.

Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most impassioned novel yet. Part epic, part alt-Western, it weaves past and present, myth and history, into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty – that still sparks in us the thrill of almost unimaginable freedom.

© Álvaro Enrigue 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Alternate History Genre Fiction Historical Science Fiction Westerns World Literature
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Critic Reviews

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
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
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
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
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
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 Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue has a flair for bringing historical figures to life in fresh, unforgettable ways... a celebration of Apache defiance and resistance
[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
A kind of cubist Western, snarling convenient cultural narratives from a dizzying array of eras and perspectives
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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