From the son of acclaimed author James Agee, a haunting novel depicting an American boy's childhood in Mexico, ensconced in a world comprised of communist European exiles, local union activists, street children, and avant-garde artists like Frida Kahlo.

Joel Agee's hallucinatory first novel begins in a house with a large garden in an unnamed Mexican town in the late 1940s, where six-and-a-half-year-old Peter reads, dreams, and plays with his friends. He is a nascent explorer, artist, philosopher, mystic, and scientist. His world is still new, not yet papered over with received knowledge.

And the actual world around him is a unique one in history: a community of leftist emigrés who have found refuge in Mexico from the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe, rubbing shoulders with Mexican labor activists and leftists such as Frida Kahlo.

But the emigrés long for home - including Peter's step-father, who wants to return to his native Germany. Going back to Europe may not be safe for any of them yet, however, which gives rise to anguished arguments among Peter's parents's and their tight group of friends.

And slowly, Peter begins to comprehend that his world may be turned upside down - that he might be forced to take leave of everyone he knows: his best friend, Arón; his father's friend Sándor, who talks about revolution and performs magic tricks; and Zita, the family's live-in-maid, who has taught him the consoling mysteries of prayer . . .

Steeped in the magic and myths of childhood - yet haunted by a harsh adult world bedeviled by instability and political turmoil - Joel Agee's The Stone World is an unforgettable portrait of a family that will inevitably invite comparison with another classic family story, that of his father James Agee's A Death in the Family.

Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has won numerous awards for his translation work, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin; the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize; and the ALTA National Translation Award, as well as fellowships form the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His essays have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and other magazines, and he is the author of two acclaimed memoirs: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The son of acclaimed writer James Agee tells a fictionalized version of his 1940s boyhood, when his mother fled America for Mexico, and raised him amid a circle including expat European communists, Mexican labor activists, and even Frida Kahlo . . .

Set in the mid-late 1940s, this book tells the story of a six-year-old boy named Peter, who finds himself in a strange new world -- a small town in Mexico. His mother, a classical musician, has left his father -- also a famous musician -- and married a German writer Peter calls his "second father."

His parents are part of a community that always seems nervous, up to something -- he stumbles on meetings where they suddenly hush themselves, there are parties that break up into political arguments (Frida Kahlo attends one and makes quite an impression of the boy). His "second father" yearns for news from Germany, and seems distracted from their project of writing a poem together. There is the sense of tragedy, just off-stage ...

But Peter spends his days absorbed with the exotic world around him - with the Mexican woman who runs the house for his mother, and teaches him Spanish, with a local boy he slowly learns is impoverished; when he tries to give his friend one of his marbles, the boy's mother beats him and accuses him of stealing it. But they roam the town and countryside together, and find it is filled with fascinating and wondrous things.

And so Peter falls in love with the place and the people in his life, even as his parents and their friends seem increasingly stressed, and they slowly break the idea to him that things may be about to change soon ....