With an American father and a Mexican mother, Harrison Shepherd is a child of two worlds, as well as a broken family. After a turbulent childhood, he finds employment as cook and secretary in the house of the artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, a tempestuous pair of revolutionaries who give sanctuary in exile to the Bolshevik leader hunted by Stalin, Lev Trotsky. It is an extraordinary time for the self-effacing Shepherd, and when it ends in death and calamity, he flees to the US to forge a new life, but his past will provide fodder for a new wave of fear and repression, and he will find himself thrust unceremoniously into the centre stage, slandered and vilified, his own art turned against him.

An incredible book, in many ways as quiet and unassuming as its hero, but filled with passion and feeling, expressed with delicacy and sensitivity. Stylistically, it is a bravura exercise in self-concealment as the narrator strives to keep himself in the background, even has he imbues the scenes and characters he describes with his magnificently vision, at once delicate and beautiful and full of immense insight. Howler monkeys terrify the child and his mother at the start of the book, other kinds of howler monkeys drive the man to an extreme act at the end - can we rely on Shepherd to deny us a happy ending? Either way, it's hard to deny the surge of emotion at the close of those book, as gorgeous, sad, angry, quiet and sensitive as its hero.