American Book Award Winner: A novel of a New Mexico teenager’s journey of physical and spiritual recovery from the author of Bless Me, Ultima. When the story opens, the eponymous hero of Rudolfo Anaya’s novel is in an ambulance en route to a hospital for crippled children in the New Mexican desert. A poor boy from Albuquerque, sixteen-year-old Tortuga takes his name from the odd, turtle-shaped mountain that is rumored to possess miraculous curative powers. Tortuga is paralyzed, and not even his mother’s fervent prayers can heal him. But under the mountain’s watchful gaze, with the support of fellow patients, he begins the Herculean task of breaking out of his shell and becoming whole again. Drawn from personal experience and imbued with the phantasmagorical vision quests that distinguish Anaya’s work, Tortuga is a joyful, life-sustaining book about hope, faith, friendship, and love that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit in the physical world. “An extraordinary storyteller.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself. "Beautiful and original...a resonant and symbolical story of nine doomed men who dream of an earthly paradise as the world winds down around them." —Newsweek

When Tortuga arrives at Abuela's house to bring her supper, Abula looks suspiciously like Coyote. Includes a glossary of Spanish words used.

A retelling of the traditional tale of the old and wise turtle outwitting the village children.

Cayona, 1669: The streets are not mean, they are downright vicious in the pirate port of Tortuga. Orphans like Jack Higgins scratch a living from errands and mugging drunken pirates, roaming the taverns, whorehouses, alleys, and gambling dens in search of prey, or a dropped penny. The tales told around tavern tables are tall and exotic: sea battles, typhoons, tortures, cannibal islands, lost cites, haunted jewels, rare honey, great treasures won with blood. They incite cruel laughter, dry asides, grim shakes of the head, and dubious guffaws. Jack, just months from manhood, sees little hope of adding to these tales. But during a hurricane's deluge Jack pulls a retching body from the flooded street. It is Old Kit, Cayona's patriarch, by legend oldest man in the Caribbean. Jack's reward is to be his prot�g� and scion. He is learning fast, wearing his first boots, received at the best brothels, meeting those who control the town and mock the pirates as fools. But can Kit's battered health hold long enough for Jack to learn to survive Cayona's literally cutthroat commerce? To win the merchant's niece he craves? Jack discovers ancient Kit owes his unnaturally long life to a dead Arawak shaman's "magic" stone, now near useless. Jack treks to Hispaniola's high country to find the shaman's holy cave - and a new stone. One touch tips him into a terrifying hallucination; or a reality where the Indian dead still live and speak. Jack must escape it and return to Tortuga to save Old Kit, his own future, and soon his own life.

A tortoise caught in a storm is washed up on a remote island and tries to protect her newly laid eggs. But a flock of sea birds raids her nest, so exhausted and sad she begins her lonely search for a mate. Paul Geraghty, winner of the Children's Book Award, beautifully charts this voyage of survival- and renewal.