The Zigzag Way

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Eric is a buttoned down Boston boy, a misfit in his family of hearty fisherfolk. Uncertain he will ever complete the book on immigration he has been funded to write, he impetuously decides to follow his bossy girlfriend to Mexico. There, he is seduced by the pageantry of this colourful new country and its old world charm, and stumbleson an astonishing discovery— his grandfather was one of the Cornish miners who worked the local mines more than a hundred years ago, and once had another wife. Soon, Eric will find himself abandoning his own tentative future project in search of his family’s other lives. The Zigzag Way is the story of twentieth century Mexico, through civil unrest and personal calamity; of the exploitation of the Mexican Indians, and their dubious saviours, such as the formidable Doña Vera, widow of a mining baron, and Eric’s own grandmother, a young Cornish girl whose grave lies in a hillside cemetery. And in unravelling their dark, often violent, histories on the Día de los Muertos, the day locals celebrate and remember their dead, Eric comes face to face with his own story, its past and present; even, the afterlife. Haunting and luminous, The Zigzag Way is a magical novel of strange, elegiac beauty.

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Anita Desai is one of India’s foremost writers. She has authored sixteen works of fiction, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999) - all shortlisted for the Booker Prize – as well as Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Girton College and Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, and most recently the Sahitya Akademi in India, Anita Desai has been awarded The Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature and the Padma Shri. Born in Mussoorie to a German mother and a Bengali father, she was educated in Delhi and currently divides her time between the US and Mexico.