Norte

This 'impressive and multifaceted novel' explores the lives of an artist, a savant, and a serial killer as they cross the Mexico-US border (Times Literary Supplement, UK). Three unconnected people travel north, each passing in isolation over one of the most troubled and controversial dividing lines in the world: the Mexico?US border. But in a melee of language and blood, their stories and the stories of those they meet of a young serial killer; a waitress and graphic novelist and her lover (and former professor); and an outsider artist in a mental institution gradually begin to coalesce. Daring in both its protagonists and its structure, Edmundo Paz Soldan's Norte is a fast-paced, vivid, and disquieting blending of distinct voices. By turns shocking, violent, and revelatory, they lay bare the darkness of the line over which these souls like so many others have passed.