. Yuri Hererra's new book is much awaited: he is a bestselling and respected Mexican author living in New Orleans, and a key voice on Mexican politics, migration, history and Mexico's relations with the US. Signs Preceding the End of the World has so far sold 32,300 copies in print in North America.

. After three works of prize-winning fiction (eg Best Translated Book Award for Signs Preceding the End of the World), he is taking a new direction with this nonfiction work, which is itself a talking point.

. Like his fiction, it is an overtly political book - it interrogates the language used at the time by the Mexican press and court inquiry, as well as the underlying classist and racist assumptions.

. We publish on the centenary of the mining disaster he is writing about - a disaster in which a US-owned mine was closed in 1920 within hours of a fire raging, and before all the miners were evacuated. Almost a hundred men died.

. The book will appeal to readers of the tradition of authors writing literary non-fiction - writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Truman Capote, Emmanuel Carrère, and Svetlana Alexievich.

. Author to write op-ed pieces on industrial disasters