In her customary crystalline prose Harriet Doerr examines the lives of four North American expatriates in a small Mexican village of a thousand souls. Set on the barren mesa of Amapolas, we see the newcomers settling in their adobe houses and gradually adjusting to an environment of excesses - hot sun, torrential downpour, sweeping landscapes, and a vastness of untouched nature - and watch as each is drawn into the aura of this land and changed. For young, recently divorced Sue Ames - artist and part owner of the land in Amapolas - this countryside of wet earth and jasmine, animal dung and charcoal fire, as well as the inhabitants, enable her to see her own life more clearly. But for her partner, Bud Loomis, ambitious investor, fleeing tax evasion charges in Arizona, Amapolas is a chance to escape. Then there is Frances Bowles, for whom this new, exotic place is a constant enigma that is at once simplistically seductive and eternally elusive; in planning to create a new future for herself, she succeeds in an unexpected way. For her mother, Ursula Bowles, seventy-nine and widowed, the land is critical. Born in Mexico, she returns not only because of her love for the place and its people but to connect - as best she can - the end of her life with its beginning. All their experiences are brought vividly to life as they interact with the Mexicans, who observe the Americans with a curious mixture of fascination and tolerance. With an unfailingly true ear, eye, and voice, Harriet Doerr's story unfolds clearly and beautifully, equally accurate in its observations of the American, the Mexicans, and the landscape that contains them.

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