A Far Country
Daniel Mason
This is a beautifully written and thoughtful novel about Isabel, a girl from a very poor region that could be anywhere in Central or Latin America, who is forced by poverty and moved by love for her brother to leave her village and go to the big city. It is also a novel about third-world urban hells and internal migration, social inequality, corrupt politics, poverty and injustice. Mason’s elegant and well-crafted prose, sometimes dreamy, sometimes elegiac, conveys a convincing sense of place and of real people living in a world that is ugly and brutal, but not beyond the redemptive power of human bonding.
