As The Path of the Jaguar opens in 1997, Guatemala is emerging from thirty-six years of civil war. Amparo Ajuix, a determined young married woman who lives in a Mayan village with her non-Mayan Guatemalan husband, is optimistic about the future. She is pregnant with her second child. With the help of an American NGO, she runs a savings club for the women in her village with the goal of being able to offer micro-credit loans. Eager to take advantage of Guatemala's new democracy to strengthen the culture of the Mayan people, she campaigns to switch the language of instruction in the village's primary school from Spanish to the local Mayan language of Cakchiquel.But Amparo's life is wracked with tensions. Dona María, an older woman who is a powerful figure in the village market where Amparo sells her handicrafts, is jealous of Amparo's savings club. Amparo's best friend, Raquel, is a born-again Protestant who disdains Amparo's devout Catholicism. The youngest of Amparo's nine...

R.U. Singh has always known he is destined to live the life of an English country squire. After a few false starts, in Bombay, Thunder Bay, and Toronto, he settles into a comfortable existence as a small-town Ontario lawyer, much solicited for the diversity he lends committees and conclaves. But—lest he forget—he is accepted only at the whim of his woman in white, a commanding university administrator, and by her whim can also fall. Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives sends up the multicultural aspirations of Canadian identity, pokes fun at our glitterati, and, tongue firmly in cheek, issues a warning: be careful who you pretend to be.