Mecca

Staff Top Fives

Our booksellers' favorite books of the year!

A masterpiece. —Michael Connelly.

A heartbreaker from beginning to end. —Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Beautiful, richly layered and full of a California that feels uniquely itself. —Attica Locke

From the National Book Award finalist Susan Straight, Mecca is a stunning epic tracing the intertwined lives of native Californians fighting for life and land

Johnny Frias has California in his blood. A descendant of the state's Indigenous people and Spanish settlers, he has Southern California's forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days working for the California Highway Patrol pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie year, when he killed a man who was in the midst of assaulting a young woman named Bunny, who proceeded to run away. But like the Santa Ana winds, which every year bring risk of fire, Johnny's moment of action twenty years ago sparks a slow-burning chain of connections that unites a vibrant, complex cast of characters in ways they never saw coming.

In Mecca, the celebrated novelist Susan Straight crafts an unforgettable American epic, examining race, history, family, and destiny through the interlocking stories of a group of native Californians all gasping for air. With sensitivity, furor, and a cinematic scope that captures California in all its injustice, history, and glory, she tells a story of the American West through the eyes of the people who built it--and continue to sustain it. As the stakes get higher and the intertwined characters in Mecca slam against barrier after barrier, we find that when push comes to shove, it's always better to push back.

"Susan Straight knows intimately the So-Cal terrain, dry, fiery, and windy, as well as its extraordinarily beautiful weirdness. With this novel Straight invites you into its wondrous snare." Luis J. Rodriguez, author of From Our Land to Our Land

“The author's love of the Inland Empire and its people shines through on every page….there is fierce compassion. This evokes the best California fiction.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“The grasslands and desert, the endless blue skies torn by the Santa Ana winds and the fires that will burn it all away. Susan Straight has written a hymn to all that have called the Golden State home. Spoken in a multitude of languages, Mecca is about America's dream and finding the perilous pathways through its history.” Walter Mosley

Watch the Powell’s virtual event with Susan Straight and Lydia Kiesling!

Susan Straight is the author of several novels, including the national bestseller Highwire Moon, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Million Nightingales, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the memoir In the Country of Women, named a best book of 2019 by NPR and Real Simple. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere. She was born and continues to live in Riverside, California, with her family, where she serves as a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.