On the Edge

Eight short stories of seduction and illicit encounters between lovers, filled with humor and eroticism, which use a circular structure located in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a colonial city of Mexico.

Against a background of war breaking out in Europe and the Mexican fiesta Day of Death, we are taken through one day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a British consul living in alcoholic disrepair and obscurity in a small southern Mexican town in 1939. The consul's self-destructive behaviour, perhaps a metaphor for a menaced civilization, is a source of perplexity and sadness to his nomadic, idealistic half-brother, Hugh, and his ex-wife, Yvonne, who has returned with hopes of healing Geoffrey and their broken marriage.

A short, unhappy affair with a married man leads a dedicated schoolteacher into the alcohol-and-drug fueled underworld of singles’ bars, where she begins to engage in a pattern of dangerous sexual activity.

A conflicted youth confesses to crimes he didn't commit while a man and woman aroused by death become obsessed with each other.