"It is a great beauty of a book..."
--Alice Walker
"A master storyteller....
An unforgettable story."
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
"A book that... deserves the widest possible audience for its beautiful prose and humanitarian heart."
--Barbara Kingsolver
A haunting, lyrical love story from an acclaimed American poet. A provocative tale of two exiles - one polictical, one emotional - and the many forms our prisons take.
Mary is nineteen, living alone in Albuquerque and, in the wake of her mother's death, longing for something meaningful to take her over. Vulnerable to love and the game for anything, she knows she has discovered the other part of herself when Jose Luis enters her life. A refugee from the civil war in El Salvador, Jose Luis had come to the United States to expose the plight of thousands being harassed, tortured, and disappeard.
Mary cannot help but fall in love with the movement and the man who represents it for her. And little by little, she begins to reveal to Jose Luis the hope that always lives in love. Though violent times conspire against Mary's dreams, eventually she lays claim to a part of herself she never knew.
Told with passion of a poet, with the unsparing honesty of a woman looking back on the most important decision of her life, the events in Mother Tongue unfold with the urgency, the inevitability, of destiny.
Mother tongue
by Demetria Martinez
A One World Book
Published by Ballentine Books
www.randomhouse.com
ISBN 0 - 345-41656 -2
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