Promotional Information

The major new novel by Mexico's leading novelist. Carlos Fuentes won this year's Spanish Royal Academy Prize for the Best Book of 2004 with This I Believe Mexico is the country of honour at London International Book Fair 2006

About the Author

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading novelist, was born in 1928. He has been his country's ambassador to France and is the author of more than ten novels. Kristina Cordero is the translator of the same author's This I Believe: An A-Z of a Writer's Life and the novel In Search Klingsor by Jorge Volpi.

Reviews

'Mexico's greatest contemporary novelist and political commentator' The Times 'In a culture often rewards laziness and celebrates conformism, hypocrisy and cynicism, Fentes is all the more striking' Tariq Ali 'One of those increasingly rare things -[The Years with Laura Diaz is] a novelthat is worth the bother and then some' Sunday Herald 'Fuentes has the master story-teller's ability not only to bring people together in thought and word and deed - but also to weave into the same tapestry great and not so great moments in history... [He] is one of the greatest living novelists' Sunday Tribune

An ailing Mexican president, two years into his mandated six-year term and manipulated by everyone around him, has banned oil exports to the U.S. and called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from occupied Colombia. In retaliation, American President Condoleezza Rice has, through the magic of an unimagined technology, shut down all of Mexico's telephone, fax and Internet communications. That's the fanciful but not entirely implausible futuristic backdrop for this corrosive political satire from Fuentes (The Old Gringo), considered Mexico's leading novelist (and one-time ambassador to France). His darkly comic tale of backbiting, double-crossing, murderous duplicity, sexual scheming and outright assassination is primarily epistolary, and it's a format that suits Fuentes's flowery prose style, though the voices of his various characters tend to blur into one another. Readers with even a smidgeon of familiarity with Mexico's unkempt political traditions will wallow in this caustic indictment. (May 16) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.