'Maybe it was the best adventure I ever had.' - Manu Chao Colombia, November 1993: A reconstructed old passenger train, bespangled with yellow butterflies, is carrying one hundred musicians, acrobats and artists on a daring adventure through the heart of a country soaked in violence. The intention is to put on free shows for locals at railway stations along the way: vibrant spectacles involving music, trapeze, tattoo-art, an ice museum and, star of the show, Roberto the fire-breathing dragon. Leading this crusade of hope is Manu Chao with his band Mano Negra. Ramon Chao is on board to chronicle the journey. As the train climbs 1,000 kilometres from Santa Marta on the Caribbean Coast to Bogota in the Altiplano, Ramon keeps one eye on the fluctuating morale of the train's eccentric cargo, and the other on the ever-changing physical and social landscape. As the papa of the train, he endures personal discomfort, internal strife, derailments, stowaways, disease, guerrillas and paramilitaries.When the train arrives in Aracataca, the real-life Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mano Negra disintegrates, leaving Manu to pick up the pieces with those determined to see this once-in-a-lifetime adventure through to the end. "The Train of Ice and Fire" is a book about hope and dreams in troubled times. It is about a father accompanying his son through an experience which will change his life. But most of all it is about Colombia, the flora, the fauna, the history, the politics and, more than any of that, it is a book about people.

Colombia, November 1993: a reconstructed old passenger train is carrying one hundred musicians, acrobats and artists on a daring adventure through the heart of a country soaked in violence. Leading this crusade of hope is Manu Chao with his band Mano Negra. Manu's father Ramon Chao is on board to chronicle the journey. As the papa of the train, he endures personal discomfort, internal strife, derailments, stowaways, disease, guerrillas and paramilitaries. When the train arrives in Aracataca, the real-life Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mano Negra disintegrates, leaving Manu to pick up the pieces with those determined to see this once-in-a-lifetime adventure through to the end.

A young man listens as his grandmother (Dolores) recounts stories from her life, which he writes down in the hope of making sense of them all. Following a fortune-telling Galician childhood and romantic adventures with a much older lover, Dolores's story takes her to Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century. Finding work as a maid in the household of high ranking Cuban official Don Mario Garcia Kohly, she finds herself immersed in a whirlwind of political change. One night during a Santeria ceremony at a sugar plantation, Dolores is blessed with the gift of ubiquity; the ability to be in two places at once. When she falls pregnant as a result of an illicit affair with Don Mario, one Dolores is sent back to Galicia while another stays on in Cuba as the political situation unfolds. Because Cuba is You is Ramon Chao's magical realist account of his own family saga and the political maelstrom into which he was born, tracing a personal and political line from the Spanish-American War to the Spanish Civil War.