Anna's website is here.

SHORT SUMMARY OF MARIA'S TANGO
María's Tango is as much about dark family secrets as it is about what happens when uncle Rubén takes her to California to become a famous Hollywood dancing star.

FULL DESCRIPTION

When María Gonzales steps from her dusty Baja California landscape into Uncle Rubén's brand new, 1935 Cadillac convertible, she believes she is leaving home to pursue her dream of becoming a famous Hollywood dancing star. Instead, the sexually precocious fifteen-year- old, of marriageable age now, in her culture, ends up dancing for dimes and turning tricks in her Uncle's seedy dance-hall brothel in San Pedro, the port city of Los Angeles.

María's Tango explores the dark corners of their relationship and other family secrets. As a dance hall hostess, sometime movie-studio dancer and young woman who falls for a sailor and bears a love child, María later decides she needs an American husband who will be a father to her son. Finally, in her role of respectability, she becomes the envy of all her Mexican relatives. As the marriage fails, we worry about María's increasing dependence upon alcohol for
consolation and her consequent inability to fulfill her role as a loving mother.

In her mid-forties, María travels to South America to visit her oldest son. She stays for a year, takes a lover and explores the underbelly of tango culture in Bogotá--one that pulsates far beneath the surface of ordinary dance halls.

After she returns to her San Pedro home, we despair as María sips from her glass and listens to tangos of love and betrayal, injustice and melancholy. She ruminates her childhood and remembers the day she left home, headed for greatness and how her mother had pressed her
own buttery jade amulet of the snake eating its own tail--for protection she'd said. María concludes that she has indeed, eaten her own tail again. Tomorrow, however, she'll make another new beginning, but tonight--one more drink, one more tango.

BIO FOR ANNA BARCOS

Anna Barcos was born in Winnipeg, Canada with a yearning to travel. She lived thirty years of family life between Los Angeles, California and Bogotá, Colombia, the familiar landscapes of her novels. While her affection for latin culture is obvious in her writing, Anna is not shy to point out what she perceives to be fundamental inequities or social injustices.

Her stories imitate the murky beginnings of the tango and its struggle for acceptance punctuated with brief moments of glory, authentic despair and self-inflicted tragedy. Like the tango lyrics of old, her protagonists tend to concentrate on their problems rather than implement the solutions which often arrive in the form of ultimatums or last chances.

Anna still loves to travel and currently lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada. Her second novel, Walls, will be published in 2008.

To read Chapter One of Anna's next novel, Walls,  click here