Excerpt
“The enormous malevolence of Sept. 11, 2001, still squats upon the imagination, resisting our efforts to comprehend it. Writers as various as Jay McInerney (The Good Life), Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), John Updike (Terrorist) and Andre Dubus III (The Garden of Last Days) have tried working the events of 9/11 into their novels, but most of these ambitious books were doomed to at least partial failure because our memories of the actual events retain an emotional immediacy that even the most skillfully crafted fiction can't approximate. But Philip Caputo’s Crossers succeeds, in part because it’s about a man who recognizes that the imagination is inadequate to comprehend evil. For Gil Castle, Caputo’s protagonist, the enormity of 9/11 is ‘beyond grasp - an insane act perpetrated by sane minds.’”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“An ambitious, wonderful novel that illuminates the modern U.S.-Mexican border and its evolution during the 20th century.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A memorable, ambitious novel about a man haunted by his past and seeking to escape along the Arizona-Mexico border… [with] a conclusion that will change everyone.”
—Boston Globe
“At once a color-filled action tale; a generational saga with a moral; a touching love story; and a bold lesson in history and its inevitabilities.”
—Dallas News
“Readers of Caputo’s Acts of Faith will be hoping for the same measured, masterly storytelling, informed by sociopolitical concerns, and they won’t be disappointed. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (Starred Review)
“Philip Caputo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reportage, and wrote the seminal Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, has long focused his fiction on the moral ambiguities that have accompanied violent conflicts around the world—Vietnam, the Sudan, Iraq. With Crossers, he brings the war home, powerfully evoking an America marked by complexities, contradictions and an uncomfortable relationship with its own past.”
—BookPage
“A masterful tale about what comes of ‘trying to escape history’—from which, the author gives us to understand, there is no safe place to hide.”
—Kirkus (Starred)
“Gorgeously stark…. Caputo’s west supersedes elemental cowboys and lone justice with the malaise of post-9/11 America and the violence of the Mexican desert—as gruesome as in Iraq—frothing with moral ambiguity and fraught with complicity.”
— Publisher’s Weekly (Starred)