In 'Far Country,' living just enough for the city

There are intimations that Isabel is gifted with the ability of "seeing farther ," a preternatural sensitivity to the suffering of others that acts much like clairvoyance. But to his credit, Mason doesn't lean on this device to stoke the action. Instead, he chooses to relate her story using a strain of realism whose magic resides in its sensual precision and empathy.

"Isabel was three when she left and four when she came home," Mason writes, of her first trip from her village, "and so her memory was only a child's memory . . . . What she remembered was this: the hot taste of the charqui her aunt pushed into her cheek with a dirty thumb when she cried; the difference in the warmth of her mother's body and the radiating heat from the ground; her father's hands, pink-burned and black with the grease of the engine."

When she turns 13, Isabel is sent to the city by her parents. Their motives are simple: If she remains in the backlands, she risks starving to death. And yet she nearly starves to death before she reaches the city.

Mason never specifies what country he is writing about, nor need he. Visit any developing country and you will find the same harrowing tableau: a capital city overrun with migrants desperate to find sustenance any way they can.

Isabel joins this teeming mass, and most of the book traces her halting path toward this new life. But Mason is also writing here about the dislocation of an entire class of human beings, who are suddenly and brutally forced to convert from an agrarian lifestyle ruled by the gods of weather to an urban one ruled by corporations and profit . He is not interested in merely the sociology of sprawl, but the human toll suffered by its constituents.