The Years with Laura Diaz

“A masterwork imbued with historical anecdotes, mystical imagery . . . relates the story of 20th-century Mexico through the fictional biography of Laura Diaz.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

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 in Fuentes's fictional world.

Now the principle figure is not Artemio Cruz but Fuentes's first major female protagonist, the extraordinary Laura Diaz. Carlos Fuentes's richly woven narrative tapestry—filled with a multitude of dramatic scenes both witty, amusing, and heartbreaking—shows us this wonderful woman as she grows into a politically committed artist who is also a wife and mother, a lover of great men, a complicated and alluring heroine whose brave honesty prevails despite her losing a son and grandson to the darkest forces of Mexico's repressive, corrupt regimes.

After a life filled with tragedy and loss, Laura Diaz is a happy woman, for she has borne witness to, and helped to affect, the course of history and has vindicated the aims and intentions of the highest art.

“In Laura Diaz, Fuentes has created a remarkable heroine.” —Booklist, starred review

“This novel is like a great painting, like a mural a complex mosaic of national and personal history . . . . It is worthy of applause-that a man who has . . . witnessed the rise and fall of governments, the birth and death of hopes-now has a woman, Laura Díaz, speak for him.” —Laura Esquivel, Reforma