Set in the crumbling Spanish missions of 19th century Baja California, this mythic novel in linked stories follows two grief-stricken people as haunted as the desolate chapels around them: a priest who caused the drowning of a native boy by compelling him to fish for pearls, and a deaf woman trying to outrun her murderous reputation as a pistolera. Though the stories span landscapes, villages, characters, and decades, the heart of the novel is Baja California itself—a stark land of cactus and creosote, of russet canyons and splintered wastes of rock—where people living in the shadow of ruined missions seek redemption on an inhospitable peninsula forsaken even by its priests.
A. Muia is the winner of the 2024 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for her novel A Desert Between Two Seas, published with the University of Georgia Press. Her stories and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Chicago Review, Image Journal, Water~Stone Review, West Branch, AWP's The Writer's Chronicle, and other journals. Her work has been anthologized in The Orison Anthology and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find out more at www.amuia.net.
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