Mexican Fiction - Playa Del Carmen

Mariano Azuela , The Underdogs (University of Pittsburgh/Signet). The first novel of the Revolution (finished in 1915), The Underdogs is told through the eyes of a group of peasants who form a semi-regular revolutionary armed band: the story concerns their escapades, progress and eventual betrayal, ambush and massacre. Initially fighting for land and liberty, they end up caught up in a cycle of violence they cannot control and descend into brutal nihilism. The novel set many of the themes of post-revolutionary Mexican writing.

Carmen Boullosa , The Miracle Worker (Jonathan Cape, o/p). One of Mexico's most promising contemporary writers, Boullosa's work focuses on traditional Mexican themes, often borrowing characters from history or myth. The Miracle Worker explores Mexican attitudes to Catholicism through the eyes of a messianic healer and her followers. The story can be seen as a parable on the Mexican political system, where ordinary Mexicans petition a distant and incomprehensible government machinery for favours, which are granted or refused in seemingly arbitrary decisions.

María Escandon , Esperanza's Box of Saints (Simon & Schuster/Picador). A charming tale of female emancipation that starts when the eponymous heroine receives a message from the saints that her dead daughter is actually alive. Esperanza's quest to find her becomes a magical realism odyssey that takes her from her small Mexican village to the dark and sleazy underworld of Tijuana and Los Angeles and forces her to question everything she thought she knew.

Laura Esquivel , Like Water for Chocolate (Black Swan/Anchor). Adapted to film, Laura Esquivel's novel has proved a huge hit in Mexico and abroad. The book is even better: sentimental (schmaltzy, even) it deals with the star-crossed romance of Tita, whose lover Pedro marries her sister. Using the magic of the kitchen, she sets out to seduce him back. The book is written in monthly episodes, each of which is prefaced with a traditional Mexican recipe. Funny, sexy, great.

Carlos Fuentes , The Death of Artemio Cruz (Penguin/Atlantic/Noonday), and The Old Gringo (Noonday). Fuentes is by far the best-known Mexican writer outside Mexico, influenced by Mariano Azuela and Juan Rulfo, and an early exponent of "magical realism". In The Death of Artemio Cruz , the hero, a rich and powerful man on his deathbed, looks back over his life and loves, from an idealist youth in the Revolution through disillusion to corruption and power; in many ways an indictment of modern Mexican society. Some of his other books are harder work: they include Distant Relations (Abacus), Where the Air is Clear (Noonday/Alfaguara), A Change of Skin (Deutsch/Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) and Terra Nostra (Penguin/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Crystal Frontier (Bloomsbury/ Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), is a collection of stories examining the way personal contacts colour Mexicans' experiences of their unequal relationship with the USA.

Sergio Cialindo , Otilia's Body (University of Texas). This prize-winning novel, published in Mexico as Otilia Rauda , traces the story of Otilia's passionate, tragic affair with an outlaw in post-revolutionary Mexico. Somewhat let down by an over-literal translation.

Jorge Ibargüengoitia , The Dead Girls, Two Crimes and others (all Chatto & Windus/Avon, o/p). One of the first modern Mexican novelists translated into English, Ibargüengoitia was killed in a plane crash in 1983. These two are both blackly comic thrillers, superbly told, the first of them based on real events.

Octavio Paz (ed), Mexican Poetry (Grove). Edited by Paz (perhaps the leading man of letters of the post-revolutionary era) and translated by Samuel Beckett, this is as good a taste as you could hope for of modern Mexican poets. Some of Paz's own poetry is also available in translation.

Juan Kullo Petlro Páramo , (Serpent's Tail/Grove). Widely regarded as the greatest Mexican novel of the twentieth century and a precursor of magic realism. The living and spirit worlds mesh when, at the dying behest of his mother, the narrator visits the deserted village haunted by the memory of his brutal patriarch father, Pedro Páramo. Dark, depressing and initially confusing but ultimately very rewarding. Rulfo's short-story collection, The Burning Plain and Other Stories (University of Texas), is rated by Gabriel García Marquez as the best in Latin America.