The Zigzag Way

Anita Desai

From Shelf: The 2005 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist

Eric is an uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. 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.

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.

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