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In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a
tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign
investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of
Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are
politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over
this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Diaz, the ruthless and
inscrutable president of the Republic. Against this backdrop, The
City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of
Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilan. Miguel is a principled young
doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for
a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia
is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by
smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city's
destitute. This unlikely pair-he a scientist and atheist and she a
committed Christian-will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of
their young son, Jose, readers follow the collapse of the old order
and its bloody aftermath. The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel
of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; Jose, a boy as beautiful
and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco
Madero, who overthrows Diaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the
tyrant's political system; and Miguel's cousin Luis, shunned as a
"sodomite." A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth
of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and
reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and
frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents
and peasants, the living and the dead.
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Death Trick (Paperback)
Richard Stevenson; Foreword by Michael Nava
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R462
R390
Discovery Miles 3 900
Save R72 (16%)
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Out of stock
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