Books

Whether they’re into food, literature, entertainment or travel, Elizabeth Mistry has some suggestions that should do the trick.

Under GBP5.00

Corn tortillas (packet of 13) GBP2.50 or Chipotle Salsa (270g) both from the Cool Chile Company. Stall at Borough Market, London. Friday & Saturday only)

Tickets to one of the staged readings of Contemporary Mexican plays at London’s Royal Court Theatre in January 2006 (GBP5 or 3 concessions).
For more information call 020 7565 5000

Under GBP10.00

The Queen of the South - Arturo Perez-Reverte’s gripping epic of narco-violence and female brawn kicks off in Sinaloa, Mexico. (published by Picador).  Great for the plane, the beach - or just if you want to curl up on the sofa after all that turkey…

Under GBP20.00

One Blood - Mexican/US singer Lila Downs’ best album to date, haunting lyrics and superb musical arrangements.

Hunger’s Brides - Paul Anderson’s epic life of Mexican mystic and poet, Sor Juana - with a contemporary twist. Published by Constable and Robinson 
The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Urrea - Mexicanwave’s Book of the Year is a beautifully crafted fable set in northern Mexico in the run up to the revolution. Sadly only available to UK readers via the internet or by placing an order with your bookseller.

Under GBP30.00

For anyone lucky enough to be within striking distance of London, treat them to a meal at Mestizo Restaurant and Tequila Bar - 103 Hampstead Road, London, NW1 3EL
Tel: 020 7387 4064.

Under GBP40.00

Something a bit special from the deseo range of Mexican Silver (OK, so we’re biased, but this is a project close to our heart). 

Under GBP50.00

How about a donation to the Juconi / Railway Children project which works with 350 street children in Puebla?

Above GBP50.00

Why not commission Master craftsman Rafael Alvarez to make you a personal jugetera? 

Every jugetera or lightbox is unique and reflects the owners personality. His work appeared in the movie Man on Fire and film director Pedro Almodovar is a fan.
In the UK contact Cesar at the House of Guadalupe, Camden Market, London. 

And for a gift they won’t forget…

A return flight to Mexico City with British Airways (from GBP637.00 including tax). 

Three nights in the capital’s hippest new hotel, Condesa df (double rooms from U$195 per night plus taxes)  Each room is slick and span - and come with a bedside iPod.

I’ve been exchanging emails with author Jim Brumfield for three years, eager to get my hands on a copy of “A Tourist in the Yucatán”, his debut novel. Now, at last, it’s being republished.

The plot unfolds in parallel strands which take place alternately in the tangled selva of the Yucatán Peninsula and the hush-hush of behind-closed-doors intrigue in Washington DC. After a rampaging shootout on a Cancun ferry in Chapter One, the story proper starts with tourist couple Jack and Josephine Phillips taking a sticky bus ride to Chichén Itzá with a mysterious stranger. The Phillips’ are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and their world is turned upside down by threatening federales and bloodthirsty thugs belonging to a drug kingpin whose tentacles reach as far as Capitol Hill.

The ancient cities of the Maya, the hurried colonial streets of Merida, and a deserted beach provide the sultry backdrop. After ‘Jo’ disappears and her husband becomes a murder suspect, the pace slows in the middle part of the book, but rewards the reader with a quest to uncover the secrets of an unexcavated pyramid. Jack clings to archaeologist Hector Flores as he, literally, lifts the lid on an ancient Mayan mystery.

Was it worth the long wait? A qualified ‘yes’. The occasional weak chapter is compensated by some really rather good passages and characters that grow with each page. I particularly warmed to the melancholic and middle-aged Nelson Carlton, a boozy but sharp-witted spook. The moderately suspenseful plot is sometimes violent and I was at times a little surprised (shocked?) just how much I enjoyed a novel featuring no fewer than five slayings in its opening scene.

In short, no great classic. But if you ignore a sprinkling of editorial errors and don’t take the stereotypes too seriously, then what’s left is a pretty good political thriller – in a clever setting. Stow it away in your backpack on your next Yucatán adventure.

Now available from Tres Picos Press, and from Amazon in May… just as the mercury shoots up in Yucatán. Jim tells me to expect a sequel based around one of the key characters in “Tourist” who will end up back in the Yucatán.

I first picked up Jennifer Clement’s novel A True Story Based on Lies one late afternoon in San Miguel de Allende last autumn while browsing in the excellent ‘Tecolcote’ bookshop just around the corner from where noisy long-tailed grackles were roosting in the jardín. Of course, I’m now back in the UK where Canongate published a paperback edition earlier this year and I read it last week.

The story explores the overlapping lives of masters and servants in a well-to-do Mexican household that rapidly unravel after a sexual relationship between Leonora, a young servant with a smattering of a convent education, and her ‘master’ leads to the birth of a daughter, Aura.

At 164 pages, the novel is short (but still made the Orange Prize ‘longlist’ in 2002) and the reader is given scant detail to help build up a picture of the house, and we learn that Mr O’Conner is a lawyer who often “does not come home until very late” but not much else. Instead, the dual narratives and unsentimental prose poetry draw the reader into a world of rumours, lies, pain and injustice, as well as exposing the darker issue of violence against women behind closed doors – something only beginning to be recognised in Mexico.

Equally set in her ways is the kindly “middle-aged” cook, Sofia (“who smelled like garlic, cumin and oregano”), with whom Leonora shares a room on the roof. Predictably, she is reproachful after Leonora reveals that she is pregnant, but it was Leonora’s mother who had instructed her three young daughters “always to say ‘yes’…” as she had packed them off to convent. Of course, it suits the O’Conners that Leonora stays, and that her daughter, Aura, is brought up as their own. The alternating chapters track Leonora’s induction into domestic work and the consequences of the encounter with Mr O’Conner but is particularly effective in subsequently exploring her daughter’s innocence and unique freedom to wander both ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’. Leonora, however, must silently savour every scrap of the child’s affection until this becomes too much for her to bear.

Clement is a poet, biographer and novelist raised in Mexico City, which is where she now lives and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. She is director of the San Miguel Poetry Week, which she founded in 1997 with her poet-sister, Barbara Sibley. Canongate will publish this paperback in the US next month but it is already available from Amazon (UK and US).