Mexico

From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors, their experiences and relationship driving the story’s developments, but these magnetic central characters are people-traffickers and kidnappers, capable of startling violence and dehumanising cruelty. And truly, they’re very much in love. For most of the novel, Estela and Epitafio are apart, having left the jungle clearing where the book opens to drive their respective consignments of human cargo to their destinations. Theirs is a single story — what happens to one has consequences for the other — told along parallel tracks.

Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona desert. He has just received a college degree, studying international relations. His response to her bafflement — and concern — is that he wants to see the reality, what it’s like ‘in the field’. This will help him better understand the issues, so he can later use the power that this understanding gives him... for what? To attend law school? Become a policy maker? But first: to write this book.

Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron Edward James); and she fled from her family, renouncing a life of privilege and ease to pursue her calling as an artist. Joanna Moorhead deplores the fact that she is ‘not much more than a footnote in art history’. But she has long been a legendary figure (among recent devotees, apparently, Madonna and Björk); in Mexico, where she lived and worked for most of her life, she is a national treasure; and for the feminist she is a heroine and her art ‘a modern woman’s codex’.

Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts for the second. ‘I’d like to be a migrant.’ The decision is telling, and frames much of what follows in this curious, delightful, if disjointed book. Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary circles. A former winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, he is tipped (by Roberto Bolaño, no less) to be one of a select ‘handful’ to take up where the ‘boom’ generation of Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes and Borges left off.

Six years ago, the Canadian author Clancy Martin made a splash with his autobiographical novel How to Sell, based on the hard-drinking years he spent as a jewellery salesman before going to college and beginning the brilliant academic career he currently enjoys as a philosopher. Now he has come up with a weird, densely focused novella about an adulterous affair being pursued by an alcoholic female writer, who is the one doing the narrating. It’s beside the point to wonder if this too is autobiographical. In his acknowledgements, Martin thanks the people who ‘together convinced me to rewrite what began as a memoir into fiction’.

Pascal Garnier’s novella Too Close to the Edge (Gallic, £7.99, translated by Emily Boyce) deals with the boredom of middle age and how passion and violence can take on the guise of salvation. Éliette has moved to the French countryside following her husband’s death. She seeks an ‘atom of madness to stop herself sliding into reason’, and finds it in the form of Étienne, a man who helps her when her car breaks down. She invites him into her lonely home, and her life. When her neighbour’s son is killed in a road accident, it becomes obvious that her new lover is linked to this tragedy in some way, and yet Éliette reacts strangely: she welcomes the criminal behaviour, and in fact becomes criminalised herself.

You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas, or the Knights Templar, or the Shower Posse. But you should have heard about them, says Ioan Grillo in his new book about transnational drug and crime gangs, because any one of them may have played a profitable and blood-drenched role in bringing you not only your weekend baggie of recreational powder, but also the gold in your earring, the lime in your gin and tonic, the avocado in your salad and even the steel in your Volvo. These ‘gangster warlords’ are the new century’s international mafias. They originate in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, although now they have trading subsidiaries everywhere from Bombay to Brixton.