Sliced Iguana - Hardcover

Isabella Tree

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 024114051X ISBN 13: 9780241140512

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

A journey into the heart of Mexico, with all its conflicting cultures and its distinctive clash of the old and the new. The unifying themes of the book and Mexico's universal loves and hates, its underlying religious faith and superstition, its obsession with death and disguise, feelings of isolation and community, sense of outrage and betryal is its passion for fantasy, idolatry and fiesta, and its love of the land. Isabella visits some of the most intriguing regions of Mexico, from Juchitan, where mothers encourage their sons to be homosexual to avoid paying dowries, to Atotonilco, scene of Easter humiliations and to the Sierra Madre Occidental - home of the Peyote.

About this title

About the Author

Isabella Tree was born in 1964 and lives in West Sussex. Her last book, ISLANDS IN THE CLOUDS: Travels in the Highlands of New Guinea, was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Award. She is also the author of THE RULING PASSION OF JOHN GOULD and was the overall winner of the Travelex Travel Writer's Award in 1999.

Review

"An eccentric heroine." Best Travel Book, 2002, Marie Claire
"Reading Sliced Iguana convinced me that I was actually in Mexico and the author’s relaxed, evocative style gave the country an exciting and endearing appeal. This book is a readable, informative and humorous account of a country that is little-known by its own people and even less by the outside world." Bookseller’s Choice
"Here is a book that goes some way towards throwing light on Mexico’s multicultural mix and its rich and bloody history... It’s clear she’s having enormous fun, but she is also attempting something serious here: to engage with and understand something of Mexico’s indigenous culture and its survival into the 21st century. Tree's second travel book confirms the promise of Islands in the Clouds: she is an accomplished traveller and a fresh and rewarding writer." Anthony Sattin, Book of the Week, The Sunday Times
"She has an array of qualities that fit her for writing about wild and remote places; insight, sympathy, courage, a lucid and colourful fluency, humour that makes many of her pages hilarious." Patrick Leigh Fermor
"One of the most accomplished travel writers to appear on the horizon for many years." Eric Newby
"Sliced Iguana is a gem of a book which shines in every direction; it is heartfelt and penetrating, poignant and touched throughout by irresistible humour. But the author's greatest achievement is to have plunged fearlessly beneath the surface of the culture it explores to produce a work that is truly relevant to our time." Jason Elliot
"Isabella Tree's rare amd exciting talent is taking travel writing into a new dimension." Alexander Frater
"Wry, perceptive, intelligent and irreverently funny... the best of travel writing. Wonderfully successful." The Times Literary Supplement
"Everything about Isabella Tree’s [Sliced Iguana] is as bright and fresh as a desert dawn. Wide-eyed and sharp-penned, she explores not the backwater myth but a fast-evolving semi-continent... Tree mixes her erudition with ebullience. Such a relief to meet a travel writer who actually has fun." Independent
"Masterly and moving... Sliced Iguana combines solid factual foundations with real insight and is an honourable contribution to the literature of this most baffling and beguiling of countries." Katie Hickman, Literary Review
"Her talent for picking apart a country before sewing it back together is remarkable. Brilliant, funny, gripping, sensitive. The warmth and wit of Sliced Iguana will ensure that Mexico is never underestimated by gringos again." The Times
"An excellent, highly readable account of this huge, fascinating country. Tree deftly intercuts her personal experience with a fluent precis of the region's tragic past and its cultural origins. Her readings of Mesoamerican civilisation and history are unerringly secure." The Guardian
"I was as hooked as if I'd been reading fiction. The magic of Tree's writing is that she takes us with her on the journey. By the end of her story, I was ready to book my plane ticket." Traveller
"Entertaining, erudite... with infectious enthusiasm. Sliced Iguana makes an intriguing introduction to the world of the indigenous people of Mexico." Daily Telegraph
"A fine example of what travel writing can achieve when it’s done well. With a sense of wonder and excitement [and] packed with exotica, crammed with reflections and insights, Sliced Iguana shows just how much more there is to Mexico than tequila and chillies." Daily Mail
"Tree writes with an impressive erudition about the conquistadors and the indigenous peoples whose lives they shattered forever. She has a connoisseur's eye for colonial architecture, and her observations are perceptive and thought-provoking. Her writing is sharp and illuminating, and this is likely to be among the best travel books published this year." Toby Green
"The author's love of Mexico is there for all to see." The Express "Oneo f the book'sp leasures is luxuriating in the writer's ilterary style. She has a fine sense of the poetic, the metaphoric, and the ironic, but it never impedes the flow of the prose." - Mexico City News

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 024114051X
• ISBN 13: 9780241140512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336