The Zigzag Way

Plot

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, heimpetuously decides to follow his bossy girlfriend to Mexico. There, he is seduced by the pageantryof this colourful new country and its old world charm, and stumbles on an astonishing discovery-his grandfather was one of the Cornish miners who worked the local mines more than a hundredyears ago, and once had another wife. Soon, Eric will find himself abandoning his own tentativefuture 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 DoñaVera, widow of a mining baron, and Eric s own grandmother, a young Cornish girl whose grave lies ina 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 pastand present; even, the afterlife.Haunting and luminous, The Zigzag Way is a magical novel of strange, elegiac beauty.