Perpetual West

In this follow-up to her auspicious debut, Sugar Run, Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize winner Maren offers a layered look at issues of identity via young married couple Alex and Elana, who have moved from small-town Virginia to El Paso. Mexican-born Alex, who was adopted at a young age by a conservative Christian couple in the United States, regularly travels across the border to Juárez to learn more about his heritage while researching a graduate school thesis on Mexican professional wrestling, or lucha libre. College student Elana becomes disaffected, an outsider to Alex’s personal journey and desperate not to define herself in terms of him: “It was about having him not be a part of the mold around her, the form to fit her in.” After a visit to her family, Elana returns home to discover that Alex is missing. She learns that Alex has fallen in love with a lucha libre fighter and landed in a dangerous situation that ends in a scary ride for him, his lover Mateo, and Maren’s readers.