The Writer’s Center welcomes Sergio Troncoso for a reading and discussion of his new novel, Nobody’s Pilgrims. Sergio will be in conversation with Charles Lane, Washington Post editorial writer.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required below.
Sergio Troncoso is most recently the author of Nobody’s Pilgrims, which won the Gold Medal for Best Novel- Adventure or Drama in English from the International Latino Book Awards. He also wrote A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, which Luis Alberto Urrea praised as “a world-class collection.” Troncoso edited Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds, which received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. A Fulbright scholar and past president of the Texas Institute of Letters, Troncoso teaches at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.
Charles Lane is a member of The Washington Post editorial board and writes a weekly column for the paper’s op-ed page. A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing, he also served as the Post’s Supreme Court correspondent between 2000 and 2007. He is the author of Freedom’s Detective: The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan and the Man Who Masterminded America’s First War on Terror and The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.
About the Book
Three runaway teenagers are chased in a road trip from the Texan frontera to New England, by a drug cartel planning to unleash chaos unto the country. A coming-of-age novel of literary fiction with a thriller twist, from preeminent Mexican-American author Sergio Troncoso, Nobody’s Pilgrims is a cross between The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and No Country for Old Men.
Seventeen-year-old Turi escapes from his abusive family by reading. He hopes to actually escape by saving up from his work at a chicken farm near Ysleta, Texas. He believes the beautiful setting of his favorite book, Connecticut, will be the perfect home for him. So, Turi sets off on the road with Arnulfo ― an undocumented teenager he met at the farm, and Molly, a lonely girl looking to build a better life. The boys start their trip by hitching a ride with an elderly man, but they leave him behind and steal his truck when they begin to suspect he’s in the middle of an illicit operation, and hiding a dangerous secret. Unfortunately for the three runaways, the secret is hidden in the truck and results in a drug cartel chasing them down, the release of a virus, and the total breakdown of society around them.