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The Line Becomes a River cover art

The Line Becomes a River

By: Francisco Cantú
Narrated by: Francisco Cantú
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Publisher's Summary

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Line Becomes a River, written and read by Francisco Cantú.

How does a line in the sand become a barrier that people will risk everything to cross?

Francisco Cantú was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. He worked the desert along the Mexican border, at the remote crossroads of drug routes and smuggling corridors, tracking humans through blistering days and frigid nights across a vast terrain.

He detains the exhausted and the parched. He hauls in the dead. He tries not to think where the stories go from there.

He is descended from Mexican immigrants, so the border is in his blood. But the line he is sworn to defend is dissolving. Haunted by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. And when an immigrant friend is caught on the wrong side of the border, Cantú faces a final confrontation with a world he believed he had escaped.

The Line Becomes a River is timely and electrifying. It brings to life this landscape of sprawling borderlands and the countless people who risk their lives to cross it. Yet it takes us beyond one person's experience to reveal truths about life on either side of an arbitrary line, wherever it is.

©2018 Francisco Cantú (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
Biographies & Memoirs Mexico Emigration & Immigration
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Critic Reviews

"Stunningly good. Beautiful, smart, raw, sad, poetic and humane.... It's the best thing I've read for ages." (James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life)

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Profile Image for Andrew

interesting

I was moved to tears by bits of this thoughtful book. And I loved the view he offered from both sides.

I was troubled though by the authors lack of consideration of one of the key issues around the border. That of if there are legitimate reasons why Americans would not want to allow everyone in Mexico or indeed the world to come to the US.

He never seems to consider this point but it is key. However fact it actually explains why the hard line approach to immigration is popular in the US and the west as a whole.

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.