There’s a sense of both turbulence and utter stillness in Kunzru’s latest novel, and a feeling of vastness and confinement. Spanning 250 years, (non-linearly), the story takes place largely in the xeric and sparsely populated Mojave Desert, at the high-energy Pinnacles, or three-fingered rock formations. The people who populate this novel tend to be restive fringe dwellers, a colorful cast of alien, isolated, and even immortal characters. A Franciscan priest, an anthropologist, hippies, drug addicts, a yuppie couple with an autistic child, a UFO cult, a fading rock star, the mythical Coyote.

The book opens with a short postcard sketch of the trickster Coyote doing bad, bad things. Coyote, interestingly, has many meanings other than wild dog—a clown, a sorcerer, a despicable person, a divine spirit, a romantic twilight voice on the wind, pirated works. All these meanings are relevant, either figuratively or metaphorically, to this story. The disparate characters from different years venture out or end up at the Pinnacles, where they feel an eerie, powerful force of energy, a transformative and potent, highly charged attraction. What is the meaning of this attraction? Read, seek, wander, believe, or disbelieve, and you will find more questions and demand less answers. The more pages you turn, the deeper you go into Kunzru’s vortex.

The ballast of the story is the Mojave; you will encounter its desert electricity as you read, see billions of stars in an endless sky, breathe life, taste death, smell the secrets of the universe, prick the spirits, absorb the infinite. And just as you are about to touch it, it flees, returns, and seduces.

This is for readers who are dazzled by the elliptical, pursue the intuitive, and relish the unknown. This is an exquisitely interpretive story where you can spread your fugitive wings, and soar, and soar again.

In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing... It is God without men.
- Honoré de Balzac, Une passion dans le désert, 1830