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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2011
On Sale: September 27, 2011
432 pages
ISBN: 0374108994
EAN: 9780374108991
Kindle: B005CS3XWW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles
deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of
the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the
city in all its glory and complexity
With The
Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most
misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel,
taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than
camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California
life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of
classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.
Araceli
is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one 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 standing—unless you
count Scott Torres, though you’d 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 shouldn’t hear, and then one morning, after a
particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty
house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens
she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are
unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is
Señor 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
experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of
Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a
novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
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