FICTION:  Growing up in the 1920s on a remote island off the coast of Mexico, young Will reluctantly moves with his ambitious Mexican mother--a ruthless woman with her eye squarely on the social ladder’s next rung--to the capital city. Here, Salomé‘s material dreams yield ever smaller returns, but her son’s world opens to surprising new possibilities. He discovers a passion for Aztec history, and enters into an exciting friendship with Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Interrupted by a brief but emotionally devastating sojourn, in 1933-34, at a military school in Washington, D.C.--his American father’s idea of a proper education--18-year-old Will is expelled ignominiously from the Potomac Academy for “irregular conduct.” Upon his return to Mexico City, he resumes his life with Diego and Frida and a very different sort of education in politics, history, and affairs of the heart. When an extraordinary opportunity arises to serve the Russian Communist refugee Lev Davidovich Trotsky, Will’s writing skills--he has kept personal diaries since his earliest childhood years--are put to new use. Until history intervenes, and amidst chaos and violence he is forced to flee north to the land of his father.


When he finally settles in small town Asheville, North Carolina, 24-year old Harrison William Shepherd undergoes a startling transformation. Struggling to shed his Mexican skin, as well as the trauma of events in Mexico City, Shepherd embraces what he sees as the American Way. That optimistic, reinvent--yourself American attitude eventually allows him to find a voice of his own, a vocation as a bestselling writer of Aztec historical novels, and a stenographer, the inimitable Violet Brown, his help meet through the darkening years. For the McCarthy era has begun, and Shepherd’s life will take yet another unforeseen turn.


The Lacuna is a gripping, heart-rending novel about the power of language, and the written word, to create a self and a destiny. It also explores how we connect with, or disconnect from, our past. Shepherd is the everyman who guides us through the labyrinth of the world as he finds it, and which we come to recognize as our own.