Happy Families is a dramatic polyphony of the many conflicting strands of Latin America and the modern urban world. The stories are punctuated by a chorus, commenting as if in a Greek tragedy, crudely and unsentimentally on the underbelly of modern Mexican life, offering a raw but richly textured glimpse of the inequalities of that society - street children, junkies, dead rock icons, the ideal wife, a honeymoon gone wrong, a child suicide, a man faking his death and beginning a new life - that throw the middle-class dramas of the linked stories into harsh relief. The result is a picture of contemporary Mexico seen through a violently fragmented narrative, not unlike the internationally successful film Amores Perros. A rich Catholic rancher wants his four sons to become priests, while the boys themselves have other plans a bereaved mother explains her daughter''s life to the man who killed her three daughters meet up around their father''s coffin for the first time in ten years a middle-aged couple meet by chance on a cruise-ship and wonder if they were once young lovers. To save his relationship, his marriage, his life, and the soul of his country, perhaps Adam will indeed have to call upon the wrath of the angels to expel all these snakes from his Mexican Eden.Ī choral novel on the hopes, disillusionments and betrayals of family life in Mexico.

Even Elle, Adam''s mistress, thinks the boy is important to their salvation-especially now that it seems the other Adam has put out a contract on Adam Gorozpe. Another unlikely snake is the little Boy-God who''s started preaching in the street wearing a white tunic and stick-on wings, inspiring Adam''s brother-in-law to give up his job writing soap operas to follow this junior deity and implore Adam to do the same. For one thing, Adam''s wife Priscila has fallen in love with the brash director of national security-also named Adam-who uses violence against token victims to hide the fact that he''s letting drug runners, murderers, and kidnappers go free.

In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden-but there are snakes in this Eden too.

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes