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Winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of 2015 Fiction Finalist for the 2015 Writers´ League of Texas Book Awards A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015 One of the Texas Observer´s "Five Books We Loved in 2015" One of PRI´s "The World´s Five Books You Should Read in 2016"

"Profound and wrenching...A deeply moving chronicle of one family´s collective devastation, full of remarkable wisdom and humor" (The New York Times Book Review) that follows the members of a wealthy Mexican family after their patriarch is kidnapped.

On an unremarkable night, José Victoriano Arteaga-the head of a thriving Mexico City family-vanishes on his way home from work. The Arteagas find few answers; the full truth of what happened to Arteaga is lost to the shadows of Mexico´s vast underworld. But soon packages arrive to the family house, offering horrifying clues.

Fear, guilt, and the prospect of financial ruin fracture the once-proud family and scatter them across the globe, yet delicate threads still hold them together: in a swimming pool in Palo Alto, Arteaga´s grandson struggles to make sense of the grief that has hobbled his family; in Mexico City, Arteaga´s mistress alternates between rage and heartbreak as she waits, in growing panic, for her lover´s return; in Austin, the Arteagas´ housekeeper tries to piece together a second life in an alienating new land; in Madrid, Arteaga´s son takes his dog through the hot and unforgiving streets, in search of his father´s ghost.

A stunningly original exploration of the wages of a hidden war, Barefoot Dogs is a heartfelt elegy to the stolen innocence of every family struck by tragedy. Urgent and vital fiction, "these powerful stories are worthy of rereading in order to fully digest the far-reaching implications of one man´s disappearance...this singular book affords the reader the chance to step inside a world of privilege and loss, and understand how the two are inextricably intertwined" (San Francisco Chronicle).

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" Barefoot Dogs is a splendid collection. Each of these stories is a straight-on jab to the soul, the kind of sharp fictional punch that wakes us up to our own flawed, fragile, essential humanity. With this debut collection, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho shows he´s already a writer of the first rank, one of those rare storytellers who leaves you wanting more even as he breaks your heart." Ben Fountain author of Billy Lynn´s Long Halftime Walk

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Ruiz-Camacho, Antonio
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho has worked as a journalist in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. A 2009 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a 2014 Dobie Paisano Fellow in Fiction, Ruiz-Camacho earned his MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He is from Toluca, Mexico, and lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.

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