The Last Summer of the Death Warriors

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, my fourth novel, officially comes out today. I started to write Death Warriors only a few months after submitting the final draft for Marcelo in the Real World. Like the other books that I have written, the seed for this one had been inside of me for many years. The seed was simply this: two very different young men (one very philosophical and idealistic and the other one very emotional and phyisical) get involved in an adventure and are transformed by each other in the process. We are used to thinking of “adventure” as something that involves physical risk, but I wanted my adventure to be about spiritual risk, about the meaning of life and the risk of not finding it. I have to confess that it was a difficult book to write. Marcelo in the Real World was so well received that I wondered whether I would ever write another book like that. It took a couple of months of struggle to finally accept that this was a different book, with its own truths to tell and its own voice. Death Warriors is a deeply personal book. Personal not in the sense that it is autobiographical, but in the sense that I lived and suffered with Pancho and D.Q. as I wrote about them. I wish this book well on this day. May it touch readers as deeply as it touched me.