Maria Venegas had been estranged from her father for fourteen years when she fin
ally made the journey back from the US to Mexico to visit him in the old haciend
a where both he and she were born. As they begin spending summers and holidays t
ogether, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fence posts, he starts to share s
tories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brut
al violence - from the final conversations he had with his own father and his ex
tradition from the US for murder, to his mother's pride after he shot a man for
the first time at age twelve. In spare, gripping prose, Venegas traces her own l
ife and her father's through the stories she inherited from him and gradually co
mes to understand the violent undercurrent that has shaped them both.
