Consider this, señora

In her customary crystalline prose Harriet Doerr examines the lives of four North American expatriates in a small Mexican village of a thousand souls. Set on the barren mesa of Amapolas, we see the newcomers settling in their adobe houses and gradually adjusting to an environment of excesses - hot sun, torrential downpour, sweeping landscapes, and a vastness of untouched nature - and watch as each is drawn into the aura of this land and changed. For young, recently divorced Sue Ames - artist and part owner of the land in Amapolas - this countryside of wet earth and jasmine, animal dung and…