Sergio Troncoso, Nobody's Pilgrims

No Country for Old Men meets Contagion in this story of three teenagers on the run, carrying a great menace, and chased by a greater evil.

Three teenagers are traveling northeast in a navy blue Ford pickup. Turi has fled his abusive family to see the beautiful New England landscape he’s always dreamed about. Arnulfo is undocumented and wants only to find someplace to work and live. Molly seeks a new life far away from her nowhere Missouri town. Turi and Arnulfo are best friends. Molly and Turi are falling in love.

But for all their innocence, violence follows the trio at every turn. The mean viejito who owns the truck wants it back. The narco who hid a deadly shipment in the truck really, really wants it back. And the imperturbable hitman the narco sends after the trio will kill anyone who stands in his way. Turi, Arnulfo, and Molly might outrun the carnage that’s stalking them ... but they can’t elude the chaos they’re carrying, no matter how far they go.

A literary novel with the propulsion of a thriller, a genre joyride written in the prose of a master, Nobody's Pilgrims both offers and questions the possibility of escape in America -- like Huckleberry Finn with a gritty frontera twist.

SERGIO TRONCOSO is the author of The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, the novels Nobody’s Pilgrims, The Nature of Truth and From This Wicked Patch of Dust; and as editor, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature of Families in between Worlds and Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence. He has taught fiction and nonfiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop for many years. A Fulbright scholar, Troncoso was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Alumni Hall of Fame and the Texas Institute of Letters. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and attended Harvard College and Yale University, where he earned graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy.