Tequila: a novel

In the summer of 1998, seven college students decide to take a graduation road trip from the Atlantic coast of Florida to the Pacific coast of California. On their trip down I-10, the true personalities of each one will begin to reveal themselves. After a wild night of partying in New Orleans, they awake in a hotel room to find that one of their fellow travelers has been murdered. From that moment on, a series of hasty decisions will lead them through the hellish landscape of a desert, through infernal guilt and silence, until an unexpected solution is found. A mirage of a solution, like all the rest. Tequila is more than a road-trip adventure. Rather, the novel explores the stripping off of the masks all of us wear within as civilized individuals, and the invention of other substitutes as selfish means of survival.

"In this novel, the exaltation of youth is turned into a tragedy, and haunts a woman for many years. Majfud's classic prose takes us on a journey through images and passions that succeed in tying together the Latin American spirit with the hidden dangers on the southern border of the United States. It's most definitely a moving novel that will leave you hypnotized."

Carlos Salomón, Professor of Borderlands Studies at California State University.

"A narrator determined to confront a violent past entraps us in her memories. Once more, Jorge Majfud shares his keen perspective on a society sickened by the excesses of modernity.

Brigitte Natanson, Professor of Latin American Literature at Université d'Orléans, France.

"Tequila is an arresting novel where adventure, delight and life on the road are united with the ethical sense and psychological exploration which characterize the works of Jorge Majfud. This time, the Uruguayan writer goes well beyond the borders he had already crossed in his previous novels to bring us a linear story that nonetheless features several interrelated narratives. What Tequila gets most right is its narration, which becomes obsessive, with subtlety and precision employed in the construction of each character and the plot itself. In short, a Majfudian novel...

Leonor Taiano, the University of Notre Dame du Lac.

"Majfud makes the reader uncomfortable with his nonconformist prose and a thoroughly unconventional dissection of the North American reality. While the excellent novel Crisis (2012) features largely unknown experiences of Latin American immigrants in the United States, in Tequila, news of a murder in Los Angeles triggers the memory of a solemn oath and a tragedy that returns from the past to haunt the narrator, who describes in detail a long-hidden secret that explains the final outcome."

Jorge Catala-Carrasco, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Newcastle University, England.