Perhaps the most ambitious novel from one of Mexico's greatest writers, the narrative covers 20 centuries of European and American culture, and prominently features the construction of El Escorial by Philip II. The title is Latin for "Our earth". Modeled on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Terra Nostra shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans.

-Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.- Milan Kundera