Mile Zero

"Mile zero" marks the location of Key West -- the island that defines the end of the American road, the cultural junction where Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Afro worlds collide. On this island, with its cruel legacy of slave trade and Latin revolution, and its turbulent present of marijuana millionaires, threadbare illegal immigrants, and hard-luck treasure hunters, lives St. Cloud, an American expatriated in his own country, a fugitive from the unresolved anguish of his generation. Chronicling St. Cloud's dangerous reawakening, Mile Zero illuminates the inward and outward tumult of our time in a huge, startling, and profoundly felt novel.

"Dazzling...a comic masterpiece crackling with backhanded wit... bursting with vital characters...a novel of uncommon richness....Its brilliantly contrived plot uncoils with the suspense of a thriller."

-- New York Times Book Review"A holy terror of a book...[It has] immense power and passion.... Half mystery, half panegyric and wholly one of a kind, Mile Zero is [a] fascinating novel about the end of the American road and the beginnings of a new world."

-- Washington Post Book World

"A mythmaking and magisterial novel." -- Vanity Fair