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In Itzel II: A Three Knives Tale, we continue to follow Nauta, Itzel and Basta through the cascading outcomes of their desire for agency and for change in themselves and in their world. As we contemplate the range of actions such desire makes them take and the range of emotions it brings, from euphoria to despair, we move from the Oaxaca coast back to Mexico City, from Nauta?s Brooklyn streets to her time in Canada, from the attraction between Basta and Itzel that has altered the characters’ friendship to the rumours and reckonings that result. The 10th of June, 1971 — The Halconazo — when the ’68 prisoners are out and the students of Mexico City return to the streets, is brought alive by the author’s intimate knowledge of an event that was in part organized by movement friends from her phone. As Nauta continues to measure her Mexican experiences against who she has become, she will see herself once more wielding the knife she has carried since puberty, as she is brought face to face not just with th

In 2005, after four months in hospitals, Dick Rayburn returns home with a limp, a disfigured face, and pain. Around tense conversations between him and his wife, Valerie, concerning their absent son, Jamie, the narrative weaves memories triggered by objects in the house. An old self-portrait draws him back to his childhood and the studio of his father, who trained Dick to be an artist, while an article critical of the Iraq War, by the journalist to whom he was engaged when they were graduate students, resurrects the person he was and the woman he loved. Dick relives his evolution from a young artist and left-wing university student to the war profiteer Valerie blames for Jamie being in Iraq, and cannot stop reliving the horror that he witnessed the day he flew into Fallujah and was shot down as his helicopter left the city. To cope with the memories that haunt him, Dick returns to his passion for painting. He paints what he saw in Fallujah, the person he feels he has become, and the loved ones he has lost. The images emerge from a deep, dark background, the principal ingredient of which is ivory black.

Ivy’s Tree is the story of a 78 year old woman learning to navigate one of the largest cities in the world: Tokyo. With a distinct sense of place – Tokyo in the fraught economic times of 2007-08 – Ivy’s Tree is also the description of an old woman coming to terms with her relationship to her family. Summoned by her only daughter to Tokyo, Ivy is newly widowed and adjusting uneasily to life without her husband. Tokyo is a daunting city for a woman travelling alone, but more daunting is the difficult relationship between mother and daughter. Ivy has no connection with her son-in-law, a traditional Japanese salary man, and her grandsons, who do not know her.

The novel is written from Ivy’s point of view. Armed with an old guide book, and keeping her travels secret from her new family, Ivy learns to negotiate an unfamiliar culture and a complex transportation system. Ivy’s inner commentaries, some provided by her dead husband Jack, are at times poignant and at other times wryly amusing. When her travels are discovered, Ivy is essentially put under house arrest, and further estranged from her daughter.