TIME

A novelist’s love song to the Mexican-American familia

This is Urrea’s fifth novel; his nonfiction The Devil’s Highway was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005

WHEN THE NOVELIST LUIS ALBERTO Urrea was 14 or 15, he took a trip deep into Mexico. He was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and a white American mother before moving just across the border and eventually into the San Diego suburbs. But his father thought he was becoming “too American,” and took him on a 27-hour journey to Mazatlán. Along

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