Highwire Moon - by Susan Straight (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A young Mexican mother struggles to reconnect with her child in America--a "heartrending, take-no-prisoners" novel (Publishers Weekly) and National Book Award finalist.

As an undocumented migrant worker, Serafina has scratched together a life for herself and her three-year-old daughter, Elvia, in the unglamorous shadows of Hollywood--until the morning she is apprehended by immigration officials and deported, separated from her terrified daughter who is crouched under the dashboard of their car.

By the time Elvia is fifteen, she has survived numerous foster homes and a father ill-suited to raising a tough-talking, pregnant young woman. Fighting for herself and her unborn child, she decides to search for her long-lost mother. Meanwhile, Serafina is making her way back across the Mexican border to find her little girl after all these years.

Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "an eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California," Susan Straight "turns headlines into poetry." As with all her work, Straight's fourth novel presents a vital and unsparing vision of America.

Review Quotes

Praise for Highwire Moon
A National Book Award Finalist

"Her gallery of misfits reminds one of Flannery O'Connor's--but with a dash of sympathy and human goodness."--The Washington Post Book World

"An eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California . . . [Straight] turns headlines into poetry."--The New York Times Book Review

"Packed with the kind of detail about people, places and emotions that transport the reader to a different world."--San Francisco Chronicle

"One of America's gutsiest writers . . . a polyglot with an astonishing ear for how people really talk in places we hardly remember they are living."--The Baltimore Sun

"Heartrending."--Publishers Weekly

Praise for In The Country of Women

"What a beautiful book! In the Country of Women must be the most populated, celebratory, filled-with-life memoir of our time. With her characteristic mix of compassion, warmth, humor, and acerbic insight, Susan Straight writes of her 'massive black and mixed-race family' and her 'quirky, deeply embedded white family'--a memoir that is, though addressed to her three daughters, a valentine to virtually everyone whom the renowned author has known in the course of her vividly described life. Unlike most contemporary memoirs, which focus upon singular, self-obsessed individuals, Susan Straight's is about an entire way of life, lived with great verve and passion: 'a strange California transcendentalism which never fit in with American upward mobility.'" --Joyce Carol Oates

"In the Country of Women is moving, fierce, and gorgeous. In a time of individualistic fragmentation and the tearing of the social fabric, Straight offers the contrary narrative, the essential need for community, its past and future, and celebrates her place in its weaving." --Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

"In the Country of Women is the astonishingly beautiful story of a life and family history that could only happen in California, just as California is a place (and an idea--of expansion, light, color, a meeting of bloodlines and cultures) that could only happen in America." --Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird

About the Author

Susan Straight has published eight novels and a memoir, In the Country of Women. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.