Now I Surrender, Alvaro Enrigue’s ambitious new novel, is about the Apache Wars, a series of skirmishes, massacres and forced removals in the US–Mexican borderlands. The book flits between the efforts of Lieutenant Colonel José María Zuloaga and his ragtag group of Mexican irregulars as they track down a widow kidnapped by Apache outlaws; the relationship between the widow and her captors; and an account of a Mexican writer’s present-day road trip with his family through the desolate landscapes where Geronimo and his Bedonkohe band of Apache made their last stand against the United States and Mexico.

Enrigue’s books are concerned with lost worlds, the gutsy people who populate the peripheries and the literal guts they spill – along with the foolish (but occasionally hardy) colonisers who extinguish those worlds. Vaqueros, Raramuri teenagers and Texan cowboys all torture one another in extravagant, excruciating fashions. Their anachronistic phrasing