In The Campaign, a witty and enthralling saga of revolutionary South America, Carlos Fuentes explores the period of profound upheaval he calls" the romantic time." His hero, Baltasar Bustos, the son of a wealthy landowner, kidnaps the baby of a prominent judge, replacing it with the black baby of a prostitute. When he catches sight of the baby's mother, though, he falls instantly in love with her and sets off on an anguished journey to repent his...

This inspired novel, Christopher Unborn, is narrated by the as yet unborn first child to be born on October 12, 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America; his conception and birth bracket the novel. A playfully savage masterpiece by Carlos Fuentes.

A radiant and epic new novel that is among the finest achievements of Mexico's greatest man of letters. The Years With Laura Diaz is Carlos Fuentes' most important novel in several decades. Like his masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and moves to Mexico City--tracing a migration during the Revolution and its aftermath that was a feature of Mexico's demographic history and that is a significant element...

First published in 1968, Carlos Fuentes's controversial novel A Change of Skin tells the story of four persons who drive from Mexico City to Veracruz one Palm Sunday. The Driver of the car is Franz, an ex-Nazi, and with him is his young Mexican lover Isabel, the talented but failed poet Javier, and his embittered wife, Elizabeth. There is a fifth person as well-the Narrator. Through him, we discover that all the characters are searching for some real...

During a long, lingering lunch at the Automobile Club de France, the elderly Comte de Branly tells a story to a friend, unnamed until the closing pages, who is in fact the first-person narrator of the novel. Branly's story is of a family named Heredia: Hugo, a noted Mexican archaeologist, and his young son, Victor, whom Branly met in Cuernavaca and who became his houseguest in Paris. There they are gradually drawn into a mysterious connection with...

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading novelist, author of The Old Gringo, Terra Nostra and The Death of Artemio Cruz, has produced what is probably the first Third World spy thriller, an action-filled, quick-paced novel of intrigue as contemporary as a headline. The Hydra Head has a constant political reality as backdrop: the permanent tension in the Middle East and the vast new oil resources of Mexico, the setting for a brilliant attempt to portray the...

In Burnt Water by Carlos Fuentes, the rich and the poor, the noble and the brutish, and street kids and aesthetes find themselves portrayed in twelve short stories examining the life of Mexico City.