Rust - Advance Uncorrected Galley - First Edition - 2012

An article in a random travel magazine - about coyotes freely roaming the banks of the Rio Grande right in the middle of the city of Albuquerque - comples talented but sociall-isolated artist Margaret Shaw to pack up and move from New York City to New Mexico. She quickly settles into a Chicano/Mexican barrio near the river, spending long days at local junkyards attempting to satisfy another recent obsession - her determination to mover her art from two dimensions to three. As she collects rusty parts from obsolete machinery, she imagines welding them into sculptures, and she never looks back at the sorrowful past she left behind in the east.

Her new life takes an unexpected turn when she meets Rico Garcia, a car mechanic known locally as "El Rey," the king of low rider welders, and impulsively asks him to teach her to weld. Unlike Margaret, whose lifestyle is completely solitary, Rico lives with his wife, three daughters, a grandaughter and his mother. There is no common ground between the two, but once they begin welding lessons at Rico's shop, a deep, instantaneous friendships sparks, igniting intense, chaotic self-reflection and driving them both to confront the damage they have suffered in their individual pasts.

Against this backdrop of emotional unpredictability, Margaret and Rico embark on an odyssey, both grounded and mystical, that carries them through the silent, wide open spaces of the high desert to the edge of healing, and perhaps beyond.

Julie Mars is the author of two previous novels (The Secret Keepers in 2000 and Anybody, Any Minute in 2008) and a memoir (A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister in 2005), which was a finalist for the Independent Press Memoir of the Year and made the Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" list. She is the recipient of many awards, including grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and the Cone fellowship. She lives in New Mexico.