Eight volunteers converge to helpcampesinos build a water system in Chiapas--a strategy to bolster the Zapatista insurgency by helping locals to assert their autonomy. Outsiders question the movement they've come so far to support--and each other--when forced into a world so unlike the poetic communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos--a world of endemic rural poverty, parochialism, and shifting loyalties to the movement. The quiet dignity of the localcompañeros and echoes of B. Traven, Joseph Conrad, and Albert Camus round out this epic yarn. Ramor Ryan is an Irish writer and translator based in Chiapas, Mexico, and is the author ofClandestines.