The River Beyond the World - Paperback

by Janet Peery (Author)

A National Book Award Finalist for Fiction

Set in the Texas/Mexico border country in the years from 1944 to the present, The River Beyond the World is the story of two women on the edge of sexual, moral, political, and spiritual divides. Luisa Cantú is a girl from a Sierra Madre mountain village. After being impregnated in a fertility ritual of ancient origin, she leaves Mexico to work in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas as a housemaid for Mrs. Eddie Hatch, a woman with a strong will and a narrow worldview. Their complex relationship--by turns mystical and pragmatic, serious and comic--reveals the many ways human beings can wound one another, the nature of love and sacrifice, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Author Biography

JANET PEERY's books include The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs (a novel), Alligator Dance (stories), and What the Thunder Said (a novella and stories). She has received numerous honors for her fiction including the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Whiting Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She lives in Cape Charles, Virginia.