Alicia
Free-spirited part-indigenous Mexican, Alicia Serrano, loses her mother, Suré, just after her birth in 1960. Motherless, Alicia develops a purposeful and resolute independence as she faces the challenges she encounters as she develops into womanhood.
She and her eighteen-year-old brother Andrés are exceptional athletes. Selected as a reserve distance runner for the Mexican Olympic team, Andrés becomes embroiled in student unrest engulfing Mexico in 1968. When he and Alicia attend a rally on the Tlatelolco Plaza twelve days before the Games, a massacre occurs. After a bullet smashes Andrés’s left ankle his foot is amputated, and Alicia helps him through his struggles to adapt to the tragedy.
Alicia’s father, Victor, fosters her passion and talent for languages as she grows up. When she qualifies with a doctorate in linguistics in 1989, she travels to Spain where she meets Alain Leroy, a West Australian. He is preparing to lead an expedition kayaking down the Niger River from the source in Guinea to the sea, a feat never accomplished before. He convinces Alicia to join the team. They become lovers. When Alain is murdered by Sierra Leonean terrorists, Alicia is distraught. She travels to WA to return his ashes to his parents.
There she challenges herself by hitch-hiking to Arnhemland to study Aboriginal languages. She accepts a lift with Lennard Currie, an Aboriginal activist and celebrated glass sculptor travelling to Windjana Gorge. He invites her to travel back to Fremantle with him, to assist in resurrecting his near extinct Malgana language. She meets the last three fluent speakers, realises the importance of the task and feels she has come home.
Emotional and absorbing, Alicia is a vividly imagined novel that brings a remarkable Mexican woman and feminist to life. Set during a watershed period in Mexican history, Alicia explores the themes of motherlessness, grief and the importance of language in the contemporary world.
Alicia is Book III in The Truth & Reconciliation Trilogy.