Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2011
On Sale: September 27, 2011
432 pages ISBN: 0374108994 EAN: 9780374108991 Kindle: B005CS3XWW Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deservesβa twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity
Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson householdβone of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standingβunless you count Scott Torres, though youβd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldnβt hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty houseβexcept for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens sheβs never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is SeΓ±or Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . .
With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experienceβas a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angelenoβto deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
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