North of Juárez, Far from Saigon

Cultures Collide in the HeartlandCurtis Myerson's life unraveled. After a drunken bar fight cost him both his marriage and his career, he takes a dead-end job as interim director of a community center in a Midwestern town where tensions simmer just beneath the surface. Across the street, transgendered Rochelle Castro Sanchez runs a tiny herbal remedy shop while quietly wrestling with doubts about her future, her lover, and the life she's built.When young Marcela Gomez is gunned down in the street in an act of gang violence, the fragile balance holding the community together begins to crack. Central American immigrants and Vietnamese refugees arrived seeking jobs and security, but resentment, cultural differences, and desperation collide in ways no one can control. Soon, the entire town finds itself pulled toward a reckoning that could either destroy them-or force them toward acceptance.Set against the backdrop of a changing American heartland, this sweeping literary novel explores loss, identity, displacement, sexual identity, and the uneasy connections between strangers whose lives become forever entwined.For readers of There There and Behold the Dreamers, this literary novel is a powerful and deeply human story about the people we overlook-and the fragile hope that can still survive in divided places.