Alfredo Véa

A nine-year-old half-Indian, half-Mexican boy struggles to find his place in the world in a novel set in the desert outside of Phoenix in 1958.

La Maravilla

A passionate exploration of the Vietnam War and its aftermath from a Mexican-American soldier's perspective follows Jesse Pasadoble as he serves his country overseas, returns to a hostile America, and, years later, copes with gang warfare in an American city. By the author of La Maravilla. Reprint.

Gods Go Begging

In San Francisco, a midget is accused of murder he did not commit in a case that has its origins in the migrant workers' camps in the 1950's. Lawyer Zeferino Del Campo takes up his defense and in the process discovers the violent world of exploited immigrants.

The Silver Cloud Café

The discovery of a priest's corpse under the Fourth Street Bridge in San Francisco leads to unexpected connections with an unsolved murder from forty years in the past

What if we could travel back in time to save our heroes from painful deaths? What if we could rewrite history to protect and reward the innocent victims of injustice? In Alfredo Véa’s daring new novel, one man does just that, taking readers on a series of remarkable journeys. Abandoned as a child, brooding and haunted as an adult, Simon Vegas, “the Mexican Flyboy,” toils for years to repair a time machine that fell into his hands in Vietnam. With the help of his friend, eccentric Hephaestus Segundo, Simon uses the device to fly through time. Wherever acts of human cruelty take place, in the past or in the present, the machine lets him lift the suffering away and deliver them to a utopian afterlife. Blending magical realism, science fiction, history, and comic-book fantasy, The Mexican Flyboy swoops readers from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the vineyards of Northern California, from Ethel Rosenberg’s execution to Joan of Arc’s pyre, in a tale of justice, trauma, regret, and redemption. The dead pass through the narrative in a parade at once heartbreaking and hopeful, among them Vincent van Gogh and Malcolm X, Ernest Hemingway and Amadou Diallo. But the living—Simon’s pregnant wife, Elena, his old friend Ezekiel Stein, prisoner Lenny Hudson—all throw doubt onto Simon’s story. Is Simon truly a “magus,” transporting martyrs to a shared community in paradise? Or is he just a man broken by loss, guilt, and the trauma of war, hopelessly lost in an illusion of his own making? Crossing genres and blending comedy with tragedy, Alfredo Véa imagines a world where we can rewrite our pasts and heal the wounds inflicted by history. Inviting comparisons to the work of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, Junot Díaz and Michael Chabon, this powerful book is like nothing else you have ever read.

Alfredo Véa

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