The Zigzag Way

Description

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.

Born and educated in India, she is the author of many novels and short stories, and has three times been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and though she lives in New York State, each year she spends time in India and Cambridge UK. In Custody was filmed by Merchant Ivory. She has travelled in Mexico, where she wrote part of this novel.

'dense with evocative imagery' * The Guardian *