A woman’s desperate flight from an Apache raid unfolds into a sweeping tale of the Mexico–US border wars.

Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, Now I Surrender radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.” In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel in service to the fledgling Republic, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, discovers 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 maneuver Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. In our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.

Part epic, part alt-Western, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. It weaves past and present, myth and history into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty—and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.

The prescient feminist fable and international classic described as “The Handmaid’s Tale for our age” (The Economist), from the Booker-shortlisted author of Stone Yard Devotional

When the women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there. Doing hard labor under a sweltering sun, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each woman's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months, it becomes clear that the women must rescue themselves.

Originally published in 2016 and ever more relevant upon its 10th anniversary, The Natural Way of Things is a lucid and illusory fable and a brilliantly plotted novel of ideas that reminds us of humankind's own vast contradictions—the capacity for savagery, selfishness, resilience, and redemption all contained by a single, vulnerable body.

The tumultuous life and radical science of a revolutionary thinker, and the history of an idea that changed the world

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science?

New findings suggest Lamarck’s basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain.

Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, The Power of Life shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science.