The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel Héctor Tobar by Héctor Tobar 9781443407113, 1443407119 instant download after payment.

The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves - a 21st century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory & complexity

With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood & deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, & ambitions.

Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household - one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking & cleaning, but the recession has hit, & suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing - unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name & an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, & then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house - except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, & the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of & heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . .

With a precise eye for the telling detail & an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly & seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience - as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, & a native Angeleno - to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.