Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, ISBN 9780571252640

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'You had better write all this in your notebook, she said, the story of what happened to us in Mexico. So when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.'

Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salom . From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, his fortunes never steady as Salom finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.

He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot in with art and revolution.

A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In Carolina, he remakes himself in America's hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

The Lacuna is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.

RRP: $35.00

About the Author: Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver was born April 8, 1955. She is an American writer. She has written, or collaborated on, 13 books, most of which are novels, but including some poems, short stories and essays. Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change," named after the bellwether. Kingsolver's books have been widely praised both for their passionate moral commitment and for their ethereal writing style. Every one of her books since Pigs in Heaven has been on The New York Times Best Seller list. Community, economic injustice and cultural difference inform the themes of Kingsolver's work.

In The Bean Trees, the main character acquires a child named Turtle and meets a family of Guatemalan immigrants whose daughter was taken by the government in an effort to force them to speak out about their underground teaching circle. They were forced to escape torture and death in their home country, but are also forced to evade the authorities in the United States. The sequel to The Bean Trees, her 1993 novel Pigs in Heaven, examines the conflicts between individual and community rights, through a story about a Cherokee child adopted out of her tribe. In Animal Dreams, the American sister of the main protagonist is kidnapped by US-backed Contras while working to promote sustainable farming in Nicaragua. In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver examined the role of the United States and other political powers in colonial and post-colonial Africa.

Kingsolver has said, "If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."

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