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The Lacuna
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The Lacuna

by Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver's novel follows Harrison Shepherd, born of an American father and Mexican mother, who becomes a cook in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in 1930s Mexico City before later working for the exiled Leon Trotsky. The story then leaps forward to the McCarthy-era United States, where Shepherd's artistic and political past makes him a target. Kingsolver uses her protagonist's journals and news clippings to create a dazzling formal structure. It is a novel about truth, media, and how history erases inconvenient lives.

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"Kingsolver at her most ambitious. The Kahlo and Rivera sections alone are worth the price of admission — extraordinary."

Ada

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Between Revolutions and Reckoning

Barbara Kingsolver has this extraordinary gift for placing quiet, observant characters at the center of history's great storms. In The Lacuna, we follow a young man who finds himself in Frida Kahlo's kitchen, in Trotsky's confidence, and eventually in the crosshairs of American paranoia. It's a novel about the gaps—the lacunas—between what we are and what others insist we must be. Absolutely stunning.


Book Details

Publisher
HarperCollins
Published
January 1, 2009
Pages
528
Language
English

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ISBN: 9780571298822

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