The Fountain at the Centre of the World

The Fountain at the Centre of the World

by RobertNewman (Author)

Synopsis

Everyone is looking for Chano Salgado...High-flying corporate PR executive Evan Hatch is dying. Dying not of the rich man's illness, but of chagas, a beetle-borne disease endemic to Latin America. Desperate for a cure, Evan travels to Mexico in search of the bone-marrow tissue match that only the brother he has never met can provide. Police and soldiers across Tamaulipas, Mexico's north-eastern state, are hunting Chano Salgado. A reclusive young widower and political apostate, Salgado's work sterilizing bottles in a tiny, smoky shack comes to an end when he is persuaded to blow up the pipelines of Ethylclad, a hazchem sluicing operation sucking the local groundwater dry, and he's forced to go on the run. Meanwhile, impoverished teenager Daniel Salgado boards a Costa Rican fishing smack in search of his long-lost father, knowing only the name of the Mexican village where he was born.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 344
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 16 Aug 2004

ISBN 10: 1844675238
ISBN 13: 9781844675234

Media Reviews
... a sublimely frisky novel ... it reads like what you'd get if Tom Wolfe climbed inside the head of Noam Chomsky. -- New York Times ...the talismanic Catch-22 of the antiglobalization protest movement, the fictional complement to Naomi Klein's influential treatise No Logo. Expect to see copies of it peeking out of battered rucksacks from Berkeley to Burlington... startlingly vivid... who is this guy? - The New York Times makes a lot of British fiction seem rather tender-minded in comparison. -Guardian [A] wonderful, big-hearted, textured, funny, moral and deeply unfashionable book. - Guardian Weekend [An] epic novel... full of incedent, emotion and polemic... an expansive, fluid and moving story. - Independent on Sunday A] testimonial to Newman's formidable range, intelligence and talent. - Publishers' Weekly Could this herald the resuscitation of the English 'literary political novel', almost dead in the water since the best work of Malcolm Lowry and Graham Greene ... [Newman] has... taken a rare risk... to remind us how the personal is political and vice versa. - Independent
Author Bio
Robert Newman is a writer, political comedian and activist. The writing of this book, his third novel, is the subject of a BBC film, Scribbling. His show, 'From Caliban to the Tailban - 500 Years of Humanitarian Intervention', is in the fourth month of a sell-out run at the Soho Theatre and will tour throughout the UK and in the U.S. over the next year.