'She is one of the best English language novelists of modern times'

'She is one of the best English language novelists of modern times'

Eric is a youngish man, self-conscious, awkward, a buttoned-down North American, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Susceptible to bossy women, he finds himself in the wake of one in Mexico, where he is overwhelmed at first with sensory overload, but is gradually seduced - by the strangeness, the colour, the contrasts, the old world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in a 'ghost' mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners, like his own grandfather, worked the mines. Until Pancho Villa and revolution came to Mexico. Desai paints a subtle, miniaturist history of 20th century Mexico, seen from unexpected perspectives, that evokes the exploitation of the Mexican Indians while yet looking askance at some of their 'saviours' like the formidable Queen of the Sierra, Dona Vera, widow of a mining baron and with a colourful, dubious, European past of her own. With vivid sympathy and brilliantly telling detail, Desai conjures up Eric's grandmother, and her poignant story, that of a young Cornish girl whose grave is in a cemetery on a Mexican hillside.

On the feast Day of the Dead, when the locals celebrate their dead, the various strands of the novel come together hauntingly, bringing Eric face to face with his past and the reality of his present in a moment of quiet, powerful epiphany. Restrained, controlled, with splashes of exuberant colour and darker violence, this is a magical novel of strange elegiac beauty.

Anita Desai:
Born and educated in India, she is the author of many novels and short stories, and has three times been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and though she lives in New York State, each year she spends time in India and Cambridge UK. In Custody was filmed by Merchant Ivory. She has travelled in Mexico, where she wrote part of this novel.

2006-11-03 A luminous novel set in Mexico

Eric O'Brien is an uncertain and awkward young man, a would-be writer and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend Em to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload and gradually seduced by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world and its celebrations of the Dia de los Muertos. He finds himself in a curious quest for his own family in a ghost mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. Until Pancho Villa and revolution came to Mexico.
A recording of this novel is available from BBC Audiobooks and Eleanor Bron's reading is truly breathtaking. Highly recommended.