Tijuana Straits: A Novel

✍ Scribed by Nunn, Kem

• Book ID: 107908082
• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 222 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780684843056

✦ Synopsis

From National Book Award-nominated Kem Nunn comes an exquisitely written tale of loss and redemption along California's untamed borderland, confirming his reputation as a master of suspense and a novelist of the first rank.
When Fahey, once a great surfer, now a reclusive ex-con, meets Magdalena, she is running from a pack of wild dogs along the ragged wasteland where California and Mexico meet the Pacific Ocean -- a spot once known to the men who rode its giant waves as the Tijuana Straits. Magdalena has barely survived an attack on her life and Fahey, against his every instinct, takes her in.
An environmental activist, Magdalena is engaged in the struggle for the rights of the thousands of peasants streaming from Mexico's impoverished heartland to work in the maquilladoras -- the foreign-owned factories that line her country's border, polluting its air and fouling its rivers. She is passionate about her work, and perhaps has taken too many risks with her own safety.
As Magdalena attempts to reconstruct the events that delivered her, battered and confused, into Fahey's strange yet oddly seductive world, she examines every lead, never guessing the truth about the man who has marked her for death. Armando Santoya, beset by personal tragedy, an aberration born of the very conditions Magdalena has dedicated her life to fight against, is leading a trio of killers on a drug-fueled mission to end her life -- and that of Fahey, her new protector, confidant, and friend -- in a final duel on the beaches of the Tijuana Straits.

**

From Publishers Weekly

Sam Fahey, an ex-con and ex-surfer now running a worm farm, is tracking a pack of feral dogs in the Tijuana River Valley when he encounters a badly beaten Mexican woman stumbling across the dunes near Tijuana Straits, a legendary surf spot. But surfing is only a backdrop in Nunn's intense, beautifully written literary thriller; the novel's real subject is the lawless U.S.-Mexico border, and its real story revolves around three damaged lives: the Mexican refugee, an activist named Magdalena Rivera fighting for economic and environmental justice in industrial Tijuana; Armando Santoya, whose life spirals into a drug-fueled rage when his baby is poisoned by the toxic chemicals his wife works with; and Fahey himself, a fully realized antihero struggling to atone for his own troubled life. In a series of long flashbacks, Nunn relates their backstoriesalong with the painful history of a rugged chunk of the Southern California coastsetting the stage for a powerful, visceral denouement. The novel is an elegy of lost innocence, an exploration of the corrupting power of greed and progress on the land and the people, but its triumph is the complete integration of character and plot. This is a sad but deeply satisfying and intensely moving story. With this fifth novel, Nunn has written a terrific book that more than affirms the promise of his early work.
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Feminist and environmental activist Magdalena has barely survived a vicious attack by tattooed thugs. Washed ashore at the borderlands, where California and Mexico meet the Pacific, she is rescued by the reluctant Fahey, an ex-con and surfer turned worm farmer. This saint-and-sinner dichotomy serves as the launching point for Nunn's signature theme of the search for redemption, as Fahey, enervated by past misdeeds, marshals the energy to keep Magdalena safe while eluding her tormentors. Nunn shares with Carl Hiaasen a deep moral outrage and a flair for creating, in surrealistic fashion, exaggeratedly malevolent villains amid a stewing, toxic landscape; however, he shares none of Hiaasen's humor, and his stony solemnity, at times, turns his prose dense and ponderous and his story line oppressive. Still, there's no denying his talent, and it comes shining through in the novel's best passages--the climactic pulse-pounding race through the dunes, the near-mystical surfing scenes. This one, then, is for Nunn's devoted inner circle of fans; others would do better by picking up Tapping the Source (1983) or The Dogs of Winter (1997). Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved