Now I Surrender

This three-part saga of the Apache Wars and the long shadow of imperialism constitutes a major work of historical reclamation from Enrigue (You Dreamed of Empires). It begins in 1836 in border hamlet Janos, where widow Camila Ezguerra is kidnapped from her ranch. On their trail is Lt. Col. José María Zuloaga, who’s made a name for himself killing Apaches for the “fledgling republic of Mexico,” along with a motley crew of conscripts. Enrigue alternates from their expedition to the 1886 surrender of Geronimo and its aftermath, with chapters from historical figures like President Grover Cleveland, frustrated that Geronimo wasn’t caught before (“Our army is the biggest in the world,” he tells his secretary of war) and Geronimo’s revolutionary heir, Pancho Villa, who, in 1916, describes how he learned battlefield strategies from the elder’s spirt. Threaded throughout is the author’s record of a road trip he takes with his family in present-day America, stopping at such landmarks as Geronimo’s tomb in Oklahoma, and hoping along the way to rediscover the history behind the genocide of the Americas. “Westerns,” Enrigue writes in this urgent and painstakingly researched narrative, “are the fairy tales gringos tell themselves to assure the triumph of bureaucratic reason over the excesses of individual will.” It’s an eloquent rejoinder to the mythos that made two countries while erasing the lives of their original inhabitants. Agent: Ria Julien, Francis Goldin Literary. (Mar.)