In this radiant hope-filled new novel, Carlos Fuentes gives us a richly painted portrait of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Laura Díaz -- a woman who becomes as much a part of our history as of the Mexican history she observes and helps to create. Filled with brilliantly colored scenes and heartbreaking dramas, the epic story of The Years with Laura Díaz is also a novel of subtle and penetrating psychological insight. As in Fuentes's masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and then moves to Mexico City, tracing a migration during the Revolution and, its aftermath that is an important element in Laura Díaz's life as well as in Mexico's history. This extraordinary young woman, born in 1898, grows into a devoted wife and mother, becomes the lover of great men , and, before her death in 1972, is celebrated as a politically committed artist on whom none of the poignant paradoxes of Mexican life been lost. Significantly, her life story comes to us thanks to her Chicano great-grandson, inheritor of both her gifts and her paradoxes: the novel opens in Detroit and closes in Los Angeles with him. Laura Díaz is a complicated and alluring heroine whose brave honesty and good heart prevail despite her losing a brother and a  grandson to the darkest forces of Mexico's turbulent, corrupt politics, and a son to the ravages of a disease that consumes him before his greatness can be fulfilled. Yet in the end she is a happy woman, despite the tragedy and loss, for she has borne witness to and helped to affect her country's life, and she has loved and understood with unflinching honesty. In this most important novel in decades, Carlos Fuentes places the complex world of the twentieth century firmly in the hands of a heroine who is sure to become a lasting emblem of Mexico's -- and our -- recent past.