In the New York Times bestselling Hard Country, Michael McGarrity gave readers “an expansive, lyrical period Western in the tradition of A. B. Guthrie Jr. and Larry McMurtry” (Hampton Sides). Now McGarrity continues his richly authentic epic of life on the last vestiges of the twentieth-century American frontier. Scarred by the loss of an older brother he idolized, estranged from a father he barely knows, and deeply troubled by the failing health of a mother he adores, young Matthew Kerney is suddenly and irrevocably forced to set aside his childhood and take on responsibilities far beyond his years. When the world spirals into the Great Depression and drought settles like a plague over the nation, Matt must abandon his own dreams to salvage the Kerney ranch. Plunged into a deep trough of dark family secrets, hidden crimes, broken promises, and lies, Matt must struggle to survive on the unforgiving, sun-blasted Tularosa Basin.

In this Bonnie and Clyde story of love and betrayal, a band of outlaws fight for control of the brutal Brazilian outback. Set in the sparse frontier settlements of northeastern Brazil—a dry, forbidding, and wild region the size of Texas, known locally as the Sertão—Backlands tells the true story of a group of nomadic outlaws who reigned over the area from about 1922 until 1938. Taking from the rich, admired—and feared—by the poor, they were led by the famously charismatic bandit Lampião. The gang maintained their influence by fighting off all the police and soldiers the region could muster. A one-eyed goat rancher who first set out to avenge his father's murder in a lawless land, Lampião proved to be too good a leader, fighter, and strategist to ever return home again. By 1925 he commanded the biggest gang of outlaws in Brazil. Known to this day as a "prince," Lampião had everything: brains, money, power, charisma, and luck. Everything but love, until he met Maria Bonita. "You teach me to make lace, and I'll teach you to make love"—this was the song the bandits marched to, across the vast open reaches of their starkly beautiful backlands, and it was Maria Bonita who made it come true. She was stuck in a loveless marriage when she met Lampião, but she rode off with him, becoming "Queen of the Bandits." Together the couple—still celebrated folk heroes—would become the country's most wanted figures, protecting their extraordinary freedom through cunning. Victoria Shorr's stunning literary debut tells Maria's story, her narrative of the intense freedoms, terrors, and sorrows of this chosen life, the end of which is clear to her all along. With the federal government in Rio mobilizing against the bandits, Backlands describes the epic final days of Lampião’s "fatal month," July on the River of Disorder, as the gang struggles to summon their good star to save them one more time.

After the deaths of his wife and brother, John Kerney gives up his West Texas ranch and heads south in search of a new home. Soon Kerney is offered work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory--a job that will forever change his life.

"Set in the vast and sometimes violent landscape of contemporary Brazil, this is a gorgeous collection of stories-wise, hopeful, and forgiving, but clear-eyed in its exploration of the toll taken on the human heart by greed, malice, and the lust for land." -Debra Murphy, Publisher of Idyll's Press, Founder of CatholicFiction.net

A NOVEL OF NORTHERN BRAZIL BY ONE OF THE LEADING BRAZILIAN AUTHORS.

The great saga of an American ranching family that gripped readers in the New York Times bestselling novel Hard Country and its sequel, Backlands, concludes in The Last Ranch, the final, mesmerizing novel in Michael McGarrity’s powerful and richly authentic American West trilogy. When Matthew Kerney returns to his ranch in the remote, beautiful San Andres Mountains of New Mexico, honorably discharged after serving in Sicily during World War II, he must not only endeavor to recover physically and emotionally from a devastating combat injury, but he must also fight attempts by the U.S. Army to seize control of his land for expanded weapons testing. Yet keeping his land is only half the battle as he struggles with an aging father no longer able to carry his load at the ranch, an ex-convict intent on killing him, and a failing relationship with a woman he dearly loves. As Matt’s personal and family life unravels, a punishing drought pushes him to the brink of ruin, and he is forced to draw upon all his mental and physical resources to keep his world—and the people in it—from collapsing. Spanning the era from World War II to the end of the Vietnam conflict, The Last Ranch enthralls with the deeply rich, sometimes heartbreaking Kerney family saga as it steps brilliantly into the mid-twentieth-century world of the new American West.

Winner of the 2017 Jabuti Book Prize The Zika virus is devastating lives and communities. Children across the Americas are being born with severe disabilities because of it. Yet during the desolating outbreak, Brazil played host to both the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, leading many to suspect that the true impact of the virus has been subject to a cover-up of international proportions. Beginning in the northeast, where the devastation has been most felt, professor of bioethics and award-winning documentary filmmaker Debora Diniz travels across Brazil tracing the virus’s origin and spread. Along the journey she meets a host of fearless families, doctors and scientists uncovering the virus’s impact on local communities. In doing so Diniz paints a vivid picture of the Zika epidemic, exposing the Brazilian government’s complicity in allowing the virus to spread while championing the efforts of local doctors and mothers who, working together, are raising awareness of the virus and fighting for the rights of children affected by Zika.