The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

It's been more than 10 years since her mega-selling novel The Poisonwood Bible, but Kingsolver-who's written mostly nonfiction in the interim-hasn't lost her touch. With this rich, sprawling saga set in Mexico and the U.S. over decades, she delivers her signature blend of exotic locale, political backdrop and immediately engaging story line. Lacuna follows the life of a fictional character named Harrison Shepherd, the unassuming son of a Mexican mother and a D.C. bureaucrat. His parents' divorce leaves Harrison forever torn between two cultures: Mexico and the joyless U.S. military academy where he's sent to be near his father. Then, by 1935, he is hired (Forrest Gump-like) as a houseboy for muralist Diego Rivera and his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, who adopts Harrison as her confidante. Indelibly influenced by his bohemian employers, Harrison becomes a celebrated author after a political assassination forces him to flee Mexico City for America, where he gets caught up in the postwar Red Scare. Like an underwater lacuna, defined by the author as "an opening, like a mouth...into the belly of the earth," this inventive novel teems with dark beauty.