Eric is an uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload, but gradually seduced — by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older 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 worked the rich steams in the earth. Until Pancho Villa and revolution came to Mexico. . . Desai paints a subtle, miniaturist history of twentieth-century Mexico, seen from unexpected perspectives, evoking the exploitation of the Mexican Indians while looking askance at some of their ‘saviours’ like the formidable Queen of the Sierra, Dona Vera, widow of a minining baron and with a colourful, dubious, European past of her own. With vivid sympathy and brilliantly telling detail, Desai conjures up Eric’s grand-parents, and the poignant story of a young English girl whose grave is in a cemetery on a Mexican hillside. On the Dia de los Muertos, the feastday when the locals celebrate and remember their dead, the various strands of the novel come together hauntingly, bringing together past and present in a moment of quiet, powerful epiphany. Mysterious and disturbing, with splashes of exuberant colour and darker violence, this is a magical novel of strange elegiac beauty.
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