Feb 28, 2018

THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER 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.

The jacket shows a painted silhouette of a wolf that is pertinent to the text. The lettering is in the graduated colour tones typically seen in Mexican printed matter. The paper stock is a very tactile brown paper. This contrasts with the stark reality of the photograph by Anthony Suau (Gallery Stock) of the open desert border between the US and Mexico which is used for the endpapers.

The Line Becomes a River is published on 1 March by Bodley Head.

About