Eric is a newly minted historian just out of graduate school, plagued by self-doubt over both his past choices and his future options. With no clear direction, he follows his lover, Em, when she travels to the Yucatan for her scientific research, but ends up alone in this foreign place. And so he pursues his own private quest, tracing his family's history to a Mexican ghost town, where, a hundred years earlier, young Cornish miners-among them Eric's grandparents-toiled to the death.
Now, in place of the Cornish workers, the native Huichol Indians suffer the cruelty of the mines. When he inquires into their lives, Eric provokes the ire of their self-appointed savior, Dona Vera. Known as the "Queen of the Sierra," Dona Vera is the widow of a mining baron who has dedicated her fortune to preserving the Huichol culture. But her formidable presence belies a dubious past.
"Long before Jhumpa Lahiri ... long before Monica Ali ... another novelist was offering us exquisitely detailed portraits of bodies in transit [and] classes in the art of sly and sensuous fiction ... Anita Desai was a global, migrant writer before such a thing was fashionable."
