In Search of Snow

Set in Arizona in the mid-1950s and alive with the unique racial mix of the American Southwest, In Search of Snow tells the story of Mike McGurk, a sort of blue-collar Don Quixote, whose search for love forms the backbone of this American picaresque novel. Son of the redoubtable Texaco Turk McGurk - gas station operator, small-time boxer, and wandering misfit who lets loose foul-mouthed slurs about almost everyone and hews to an impossible, often hilarious, code of masculinity - Mike yearns for his mother, who died when he was seven, and for a sense of family and connection, which the emotionally bankrupt Turk, for all his bluster and redneck charm, cannot provide. In his search for love and a life in the Arizona desert, where opportunities for both are limited, Mike makes a new friend in Bobo Garcia, a Mexican-American prize-fighter-turned-mechanic who is also a World War II veteran, albeit one who saw more of that war's horrors than Mike. Bobo rescues Mike from the clutches of Ramses Castro and his Indian gang and accompanies him on a journey that leads from one unlikely adventure to the next. From the excitement of erotic love, which beckons in the person of Mike's college-bound cousin Lily, to the comfort and responsibility of familial love amid the sprawling Garcia clan, Mike struggles with the sometimes comic dilemma of manhood. Although he begins as the victim of circumstance, Mike finally takes charge of his own destiny through a cathartic act of destruction that lights up his beloved Arizona desert. With a remarkable variety of idiosyncratic characters who are imagined in detail so telling that even their bedroom slippers speak volumes and with natural scenes so intimately rendered that you can hear the delicate sound of sand granules rustling along the tarmac in a light desert wind, In Search of Snow introduces an exciting new writer whose gift for fiction is as dazzling as his prose.