The Fountain at the Centre of the World - About the Book

Everyone is looking for Chano Salgado...

High-flying corporate PR executive Evan Hatch is dying. Dying not of a rich man's disease, but of chagas, a beetle-born disease endemic to Latin America. Desperate for a cure, Evan leaves travels to Mexico in search of the bone-marrow tissue-match that only the brother he has never met can provide.

Reclusive young widower and political apostate, Chano Salgado's work sterilizing bottles in a tiny, smoky shack comes to an end when he is persuaded to blow up the pipelines of Ethylclad, a toxic-waste plant sucking the local groundwater dry.

Police and soldiers across Tamaulipas, Mexico's northeasternmost state, are hunting Chano Salgado the terrorist saboteur; while teenager Daniel Salgado, boards a Costa Rican fishing-smack knowing only the name of the Mexican village where he was born.

An epic novel about loss and hope, identity and belief, the story takes us, via container-crate and conference-suite, assassination and passport-theft, from refugee detention centre and Rio Bravo to the Seattle WTO protests. And here on the streets of Seattle, amid tear gas and rubber bullets, the destinies of Chano, Evan and Daniel are changed forever.

The novel is published by Verso Books (UK) and Soft Skull (USA).