The Lacuna

"What really went on in the household of Frida Kahlo and her painter husband, Diego Rivera? Their stormy relationship, full of extra-marital flings and break-ups, is probably as famous as their art, and the curiosity factor grows when they sheltered Leon Trotsky during the 1930s. Grounded in history, Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel imagines what happened behind closed doors, through the eyes of their housekeeper, Harrison Shepherd.
Kingsolver’s epic story – spanning four decades of political upheavals in America and Mexico – is a vivid, colour-soaked depiction of those times. Kingsolver seems pulled between following her characters, and the historical events. It’s a dense, often too wide-stretching plot, (and it certainly does take a while to get going) but the characters – social climbers, lefties, do-gooders and crooks – make her rich, poetic writing come alive.
Lacuna is a welcome return to print for Kingsolver and will delight fans of The Prodigal Summer, The Poisonwood Bible etc as well as taking her to a new, wider audience."

Book description

The first novel in nine years from Barbara Kingsolver, author of the international bestseller, The Poisonwood Bible.

'You had better write all this in your notebook, she said, the story of what happened to us in Mexico. So when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.'

Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.

He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot in with art and revolution.

A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In Carolina, he remakes himself in America's hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

The Lacuna is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.

About Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in eastern Kentucky. Her books include poetry, non-fiction and award-winning fiction, and in 1999 she was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for The Poisonwood Bible. She lives with her husband and daughter in southern Arizona and in the mountains of southern Appalachia.