Just off the Pacific coast of Mexico, at San Blas in Nayarit, the White Rock juts up out of the sea. For the Wixárika people, who call it Tatéi Haramara or Mother Ocean, it is a sacred place. According to Wixárika cosmogony, when time began and there was nothing but boiling water covering the earth, the rock was the first solid object to be born and the origin of all life. For thousands of years the Wixárika have made pilgrimages to the site to offer sacrifices and to give thanks.
In Anna Hope’s fourth novel, The White Rock, this hallowed place is the fulcrum for four loosely connected narratives. Opening in 2020 with the story of a British writer whose faith in the future, both personally and globally, is crumbling, the book travels backwards in time, first to the 1960s and a burned-out American rock star running from fame and the Feds, and then to the first decade of the 20th century as two sisters from the persecuted Yoeme tribe are seized from their mountain village and shipped south to be sold as slaves. Hope’s fourth story chronicles the breakdown in 1775 of a Spanish naval lieutenant as he prepares to sail north on a mission to map the coast of California and claim new territories for his king. Like an inverted version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the narrative then arcs around, retracing its steps through each story on its way back to the writer’s present tense.
