This image is the cover for the book River Beyond the World

River Beyond the World

A National Book Award Finalist for Fiction

Set in the Texas/Mexico border country in the years from 1944 to the present, The River Beyond the World is the story of two women on the edge of sexual, moral, political, and spiritual divides. Luisa Cantú is a girl from a Sierra Madre mountain village. After being impregnated in a fertility ritual of ancient origin, she leaves Mexico to work in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas as a housemaid for Mrs. Eddie Hatch, a woman with a strong will and a narrow worldview. Their complex relationship—by turns mystical and pragmatic, serious and comic—reveals the many ways human beings can wound one another, the nature of love and sacrifice, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Janet Peery

Janet Peery is the author of the collection Alligator Dance, and her stories have been widely published. In addition to being a National Book Award Finalist, she has received an NEA Fellowship, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, and her stories have been twice cited in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize XVI and XVII. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.

Picador