Anna Hope’s fourth novel may begin in the cramped, sweaty confines of a van making its way through Mexico but its narrative sweep is capacious, straddling the experiences of a quartet of very different characters over more than200 years. It has ambition to match, musing on freedom and reciprocity, on the redemptive power of storytelling and the sustaining force of ritual. Climate anxiety features prominently, too, though it’s through the rock of its title that Hope strives to bind the book together.
According to Wixárika legend, the rock was the first solid object born on Earth. Or as Hope would have it: “Here was the place that formlessness first fell in love with form.” Located a few hundred metres off the coast of a sleepy-seeming backwater called San Blas, it remains a place of pilgrimage and its sacred potency has combined with strategic importance to provide an arresting, haunted history.
