Spooky and sublime.
—The Paris Review

A gripping road novel: an American couple travels the Chihuahua countryside encountering love, hate, and Mexican drug dealers

The Trace

Fiction by Forrest Gander

The Trace is Forrest Gander’s new masterful, poetic novel about a road trip through Mexico. After a devastating incident involving their adolescent son, a couple embark upon a trip through the vast Chihuahua Desert. They retrace the steps of Ambrose Bierce and try to piece their lives back together. With tender precision, Gander explores the intimacy as they travel through towns and picturesque canyons on a journey through the heart of the Mexican desert. After taking a short-cut through the brutally hot countryside, their car overheats miles from nowhere with terrible consequences. . . .

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Paperback (published October 27, 2015)

ISBN
9780811224864
Price US
14.95
Price CN
19.5
Page Count
245

Clothbound (published October 27, 2015)

ISBN
9780811223713
Price US
22.95
Price CN
25.95
Page Count
240

Ebook (published October 27, 2015)

ISBN
9780811223720
Page Count
240

Forrest Gander

American poet, novelist, and translator

Spooky and sublime.
—The Paris Review
Gander’s novel surges. No other writer that I know of has so accurately and carefully depicted the tiny internecine battles of two lovers on an interminable drive as does Gander in this book.
—Lowry Pressly, Los Angeles Review of Books
The Trace is a poet’s book, which is to say it is filled with the pleasures of language, sharply and skillfully used, but Forrest Gander also has the narrative drive of the best novelists. The Trace is a tense, propulsive thriller, which keeps on building until the very last page.
—Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men
Gander’s poetic writing lends this story a dense, brooding atmosphere; a carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation.
—The New Yorker
As in his previous works, Gander shows he is keenly aware of the loneliness that imbues human suffering and sets grief alight using beautiful, tense, haunting prose.
—Publishers Weekly
What really haunts Gander, who is a translator as well as a poet, isn’t so much death as the complexities of life: the frequently unknown stories that lie beneath and within the stories we tell.
—The Washington Post
His work burrows into the particularities of disparate places and cultures in order to sound the differences between them.
—The Boston Review
A restlessly experimental writer.
—Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World
A moving elegy. It is also proof that language has magical potential.
—Joanna Scott
The clarity of his artistic vision, formal innovation, and emotional honesty are enviable.
—The Harvard Review
In this strange and beautiful novel as in life, love is part of what is sacred.
—Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review