THE LACUNA

The Lacuna is the story of a man's search for safety in the grinding jawsof two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent onreinventing itself at any cost.Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico,Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flappermother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoodsof 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school inVirginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her richmen-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimesshe gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything witha peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns fromservants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in thestreets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralistDiego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, hiswife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherdinadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossipand reportage that dictate public opinion.A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in theinternationalist goodwill of World War II. In the mountain city ofAsheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America's hopeful image.Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds anextraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political windscontinue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns manytimes on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and publicpresumption.This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and thepower of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, itilluminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a post-warlandscape of narrowly defined ‘Americanism'. Crossing two decades,from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of aCongress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and richas the New World itself.