FOR BOOK CLUBS
A beautiful and meaningful collection of stories capturing of our timeless matters of the heart: faith, loss, betrayal, yearning, and the ragged hot rock-strewn desert path that is the way to redemption. I can think of no more worthy collection to wear Flannery O'Connor's mantle.
—Bret Lott, Author, Jewel
Mulegé Mission. Photo by the author.
CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
Invite author A. Muia to your book club—in person or virtually—and enjoy a curated discussion for your members.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Set in the crumbling Spanish missions of 19th century Baja California, the stories follow two grief-stricken people as haunted as the desolate chapels around them: a priest who caused the drowning of a native boy by compelling him to fish for pearls, and a deaf woman trying to outrun her murderous reputation as a pistolera. Though the stories span landscapes, villages, characters, and decades, the heart of the novel is Baja California itself—a stark land of cactus and creosote, of russet canyons and splintered wastes of rock—where people living in the shadow of ruined missions seek redemption on an inhospitable peninsula forsaken even by its priests.
THEMES
Trust, grace, guilt, redemption, faith, broken family relationships, abandonment, hope.
BOOK DISCUSSION GUIDE
Coming soon!
Muia’s language is like her setting: sparse and beautiful. She writes with emotional restraint, her stories driven by details and images that feel unexpected and shocking and new, a world in which love and violence, survival and hope, live side by side. Reading A Desert Between Two Seas is an immersive experience, one that I am delighted my fellow lovers of story and history, of vivid characters and setting, will soon have also.
Lori Ostlund, Author, The Bigness of the World
WINNER OF THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
Click HERE to read the press release
