A Man of His Village

by Tanyo Ravicz

Florentino Cruz takes one last job before he heads home to Mexico. He left his village at the age of fifteen, a migrant farm worker dreaming of love, honor, and riches. He accepts a promising job in Alaska, the magnificent climax to his years of toil in the United States. But the expedition collapses in mutiny and murder, leaving Florentino lost and fleeing for his life through a fire-ravaged wilderness. A Man of His Village occupies the epic terrain of the West, from the borderlands of California to the strawberry fields of Oregon, from urban Seattle to rural Mexico, from the crowded slums of Tijuana to the isolation of the Alaskan bush. This is a novel of pride and redemption, the voyage of a passionate soul out of innocence across a continental landscape of exploitation and betrayal. Peppery and sweet, lively and subtle, funny and horrific a beautiful page-turner of a novel, full of rich and generous insights. You ll long remember Florentino, whose dreams carry him far from his impoverished homeland, deep into hell. Like Jack London and John Steinbeck, Tanyo Ravicz looks closely at the ties binding the powerful and the powerless in the West First-rate realism from a fine new voice in American fiction.
Jean Anderson, author of In Extremis and Other Alaskan Stories

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 6, 2006

Reviews

[Meghan]

A Man of His Village is a sweeping, beautifully written novel that captures both the vastness of the American West and the intimate struggles of one unforgettable man. Tanyo Ravicz follows Florentino Cruz from his rural Mexican village into decades of migrant labor, hope, and heartbreak with remarkable emotional depth. The journey culminates in Alaska, where ambition curdles into violence and survival becomes elemental. Inspired by real events, the novel moves effortlessly across landscapes, fields, cities, borders, and wilderness each rendered with vivid authenticity. Florentino’s flight through a burned and lawless terrain mirrors his inner reckoning with pride, guilt, and the cost of escape. Ravicz’s prose is lyrical without losing grit, and the story honors the dignity of migrant lives too often overlooked. This is an epic of endurance and redemption that lingers long after the final page.

[Stephanie]

The life and misadventures of a Mixtec migrant worker who ends his career after working as a morel hunter in interior Alaska.