Singing into the Piano - Hardcover

True love and international affairs make strange bedfellows indeed. Ted Mooney's novel Singing into the Piano begins with two lovers, Edith and Andrew, engaging in some very heavy petting under the table while attending a political banquet in New York. The speaker is Santiago Diaz, a former soccer star and candidate for president of Mexico, and since Edith and Andrew's table is located directly in front of him, he can't help but notice what is going on. Later, when he finds the purse Edith left behind and returns it to her, Diaz draws the American couple into his own world of Mexican politics, economics, and danger. Invited to visit Diaz and his wife at their home in Mexico, Andrew and Edith find themselves first seduced by the glamour of a political campaign and then increasingly endangered by a skein of conspiracy, violence, and death. Not only has Mooney come up with an intriguing and fast-moving story, he has also penned a provocative meditation on the state of an increasingly interrelated world at the end of the 20th century.

Ted Mooney is an editor at Art in America.