FeaturedContemporary Fiction

Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

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Experience the Margarita Road with Anthony Lee Head. It is not one you will regret with its great characters and good storytelling.

I loved this book. That might be enough to persuade you to read this but I will expand on it.


To begin, the setting. Who doesn’t want to be transported to a white sandy beach in January? The time that I have spent at Paradise Beach with Poppa and the other ex-pats has been a real treat just for having this blissful location conjured in my imagination with every page that I have read. I have shared every margarita and every beach bar meal with gusto.


But more than that, I have thoroughly enjoyed every tale from this short story compilation novel with the depictions of the darker underbelly of Mexican life, the less than savoury behaviours of some ex-pats and the love affairs that make up the gossip of any small community, to name but a couple of the subjects covered in the book.


You are introduced to the life that is offered by leaving the States or elsewhere and heading south of the border, not all of it belonging to the dreamscape that people are expecting. You meet the locals, some of whom welcome the gringos, some of whom resent them and the flippant way that they can sometimes treat this paradise they have found.  You meet a wide variety of ex-pats and tourists as well as some of the local wildlife and every story/chapter is complete in itself, some with a twist, some that are poignant with feeling, some that are funny.


Anthony Lee Head’s writing style is succinct but this does not mean that it lacks description or feeling or a great capacity for storytelling: far from it. His first person narrator, Poppa immediately establishes himself as a trusted observer of the people that he encounters on the Margarita Road and he shows his astute judgment of these people and their motives in his philosophical musings throughout – for someone who ostensibly is escaping his former life by becoming a bar owner in Mexico, he shows a lot of wisdom and a very balanced approach to life. You can’t help but like him.


Head’s writing brings an array of distinctive characters alive with sharp dialogue mixed with Poppa’s impressions so that you become absorbed in the text, the individual stories unfolding at just the right pace.


I was very reluctant to leave the Margarita Road and will definitely look for more by Anthony Lee Head in future.


Reviewed by

It's not easy to sum up who I am, enough to make me interesting anyway, so what's essential to know? I love to read. I love to review. I love to write and blog at scuffedgranny.com. Short stories and poems are my main writing successes, winning runner-up plaudits on Reedsy Prompts and Vocal.media.

Poppa's Story

About the author

Anthony Lee Head was a trial attorney in San Francisco before escaping the rat race and moving to Mexico. With his wife, Cheri, he ran a small hotel and bar near the Caribbean Sea for ten years. Now back in California, he has written an anthology of stories inspired by his adventures in paradise. view profile

Published on October 10, 2020

80000 words

Contains mild explicit content ⚠️

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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