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Title: Explora Books to Host Book Signing with Jess Zepeda at the 2026 Frankfurter Buchmesse

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1st Oct 2026 - Zepeda’s novel, The Iron Grains, begins at a graveside on Easter Sunday, when a letter dated after the artist’s death is read aloud. Fair attendees can meet Zepeda and obtain signed copies at Hall 4.2 M47 on October 8 at 1 p.m.The book follows Julian Solbriozo, a young Mexican American painter from California’s San Joaquin Valley, in the years after the Vietnam War. Drafted into the US Army, he carries his murals onto the base, then returns to a valley shaped by the farmworker strikes. He takes work as a hospital orderly and rents a motel room beside the railroad tracks, where older neighbors, lovers, and patrons press in on him. A trip north to Oregon tests a friendship. Because the opening funeral is set in the Bicentennial year, the novel establishes from the outset that the artist’s story ends in loss, leaving the question of what he leaves behind.The novel grounds its story in a specific sense of place and period. Grapevines, orchards, freight trains, Fort Ord, and Pacheco Pass are drawn in specific detail, and the mid-1970s comes into focus through farmworker caravans, news of Mao’s death, and Mars landers. Zepeda’s background as a painter informs his use of color and composition: in the opening scene, a cemetery resembles a chessboard, and a crowd in black and white drains the day of color. Dialogue is quick, with moments of humor.Several themes run through the story. Julian prefers to be called Mexican rather than Mexican American, and his sense of identity is tested by the draft, the army, and the towns he passes through. Institutions, from the military to the county hospital to a landlord who forbids paintings on the walls, press against his freedom. The story also raises questions about what a nation’s...

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