The Memory of Fire

Foy's latest novel expands the gritty, high-tech near-future setting of his Contraband (1997). Soledad MacCrae is a young Mexican musician and composer on the run following the brutal destruction of her cruce, or node, of Bamaca, an anarchic community of artists, writers and musicians who chose to live outside the mainstream in their own small enclave and to dedicate their lives to creative pursuits, funded with money earned by smuggling drugs. Escaping north to San Francisco, Soledad searches for another node she's heard about in Oakland, but she quickly discovers that her past isn't so easy to leave behind. It looks as if the same megaorg corporate security forces who annihilated Bamaca may have trailed her here. Even more chilling, her arrival at the Oakland node seems to herald increased threats against the node from the local authorities, assisted by BON, the federal Bureau of Nationalizations. Danger escalates as Soledad discovers she is pregnant with the child of her Bamaca lover and lyricist, poet Jorge Echeverria, who died during the attack on that node. Now Soledad must come to terms with her past as well as her present, accepting the influence Echeverria had over her, even as she discovers that the music they created may hold the key to saving her new home. Foy sets this story of memory and love in a finely detailed setting resonant with the Borges-style recursion that life is ""a story we tell ourselves about who we wish we were. And because we are the story we tell ourselves, we in turn become the story, the story itself."" (Feb.)