First published 1999
Celia del Pino stands on her Havana porch, writing letters to her Spanish lover while Fidel Castro's revolution transforms Cuba around her. Her daughter Lourdes has fled to Brooklyn, where she runs a bakery and burns with hatred for the regime that drove her family away. Lourdes's daughter Pilar grows up caught between her mother's bitter exile politics and her own longing to understand the grandmother she barely remembers. When Celia's other daughter Felicia descends into madness in Cuba, the family fractures across an ocean of political and personal wounds. Pilar eventually travels to Cuba to meet Celia, confronting the gap between her romantic fantasies and the complex reality of her homeland. The three women struggle with questions of belonging, identity, and the weight of history as they navigate the aftermath of revolution and the pain of separation.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Havana, Brooklyn, Cuba
Period: 20th-century
Paperback · Ballantine Books (P)
Content warnings: mental-illness