From the back cover:

"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 seams in the earth.

On the Dia de los Muertos, the feast day 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."

Sending as a surprise RABCK to fulfill a bookcrossers wish.

Wow! A true RABCK. Thank you so much. What a lovely surprise that was waiting for me when I got home late after a long day in London.

Eric's searches for his past and future failed to engage me. I found the story disjointed and was frustrated by the lack of development of certain strands, e.g. Eric's relationship with Em. I most enjoyed the last section, about the lives of Eric's grandparents. Here, Anita Desai gives a sense of a particular time and place (a Cornish mining community in Mexico in the early 20th century) and creates dramatic tension around the Zapatista uprising. The early section about Eric arriving in Mexico is directionless and vague (perhaps as a deliberate ploy to convey Eric's state of mind), and the middle section about Doña Vera, while being based around an interesting doesn't fit well in Eric's story.

Off to thebookfairy as part of a trade.

Fabulous - kindly posted to me by WormyOne as a swap. I'm looking forward to reading it and passing it on. It's a relief to have a book of a manageable size too.

Thank you!

Intended to read this, but such a huge pile of books waiting, thought I'd send it on it's way. Will include in next batch for the local surgery - my most effective book exchange.