A Desert Between Two Seas: A Novel in Stories

Set in the crumbling Spanish missions of nineteenth-century Baja California, this mythic novel in linked stories follows two grief-stricken people as haunted as the desolate chapels around them: a priest who caused the drowning of a native boy by compelling him to fish for pearls, and a deaf woman trying to outrun her murderous reputation as a pistolera. Though the stories span landscapes, villages, characters, and decades, the heart of the novel is Baja California itself--a stark land of cactus and creosote, of russet canyons and splintered wastes of rock--where people living in the shadow of ruined missions seek redemption on an inhospitable peninsula forsaken even by its priests.

Author: A. Muia
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 09/15/2025
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.30h x 6.10w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9780820374383
ISBN10: 0820374385
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Short Stories (single author)
- Fiction | Family Life | General
- Fiction | Historical | General

About the Author
A. MUIA is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has been anthologized in The Orison Anthology. Her stories and articles have appeared in the Baltimore Review, the Beloit Fiction Journal, Chicago Review, Image Journal, Water Stone Review, West Branch, AWP's Writer's Chronicle, and other journals. Find her online at www.amuia.net.