The best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist, in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura A Penguin Classic Dissatisfied with his empty, Sisyphus-like existence in New York City, where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising, a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time, he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history, searching not just for music but ultimately for himself, and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.

From Leonardo Padura-whose crime novels featuring Detective Mario Conde form the basis of Netflix's Four Seasons in Havana-'The Transparency of Time' sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery spanning centuries of occult history. Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution are being swept away in favour of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money. Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant practitioner of Santeria appears on the scene to engage Conde to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla-a black Madonna. This sets Conde on a quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the distant past, as he delves as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to uncover the true provenance of the statue. Through vignettes from the life of a Catalan peasant named Antoni Barral, who appears throughout history in different guises-as a shepherd during the Spanish Civil War, as vassal to a feudal lord-we trace the Madonna to present-day Cuba. With Barral serving as Conde's alter ego, unstuck in time, and Conde serving as the author's, we are treated to a panorama of history, and reminded of the impossibility of ever remaining on its sidelines, no matter how obscure we may think our places in the action. Equal parts 'The Name of the Rose' and 'The Maltese Falcon', 'The Transparency of Time' cements Leonardo Padura's position as the preeminent literary crime writer of our time.

A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author. In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana's port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear.Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel's son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family's lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana.In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt's gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura's novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its centre.

Cuban writer Ivan Cardenas Maturell meets a mysterious foreigner on a Havana beach who is always in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. Ivan quickly names him "the man who loved dogs". The man eventually confesses that he is actually Ramon Mercader, the man who killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940, and that he is now living in a secret exile in Cuba after being released from jail in Mexico. Moving seamlessly between Ivan's life in Cuba, Mercader's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, The Man Who Loved Dogs is Leonardo Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet. It is the story of revolutions fought and betrayed, the ways in which men's political convictions are continually tested and manipulated, and a powerful critique of the role of fear in consolidating political power.

El primer fin de semana de 1989 una insistente llamada de telefono arranca de su resaca al teniente Mario Conde, un policia esceptico y desenganado. El Viejo, su jefe en la Central, le llama para encargarle un misterioso y urgente caso: Rafael Morin, jefe de la Empresa de Importaciones y Exportaciones del Ministerio de Industrias, falta de su domicilio desde el dia de Ano Nuevo. Quiere el azar que el desaparecido sea un ex companero de estudios de Conde, un tipo que ya entonces, aun acatando las normas establecidas, se destacaba por su brillantez y autodisciplina. Por si fuera poco, este caso enfrenta al teniente con el recuerdo de su antiguo amor por la joven Tamara, ahora casada con Morin. El Conde -asi le conocen sus amigos-, ira descubriendo que el aparente pasado perfecto sobre el que Rafael Morin ha ido labrando su brillante carrera ocultaba ya sus sombras.

Havana's Chinatown is not his usual beat, but when Conde is asked to take a murder case by the sultry, perfectly proportioned Police Lieutenant Patricia Chion, a frequent object of his nightly fantasies, he can't resist. Pedro Cuang is found hanging naked from a beam in the ceiling of his dingy room. One of his fingers has been cut off, and the outline of two arrows was carved with a knife on his chest. Was this a ritual Santeria killing or a just a sordid settling of accounts in a world of drug trafficking beginning to infiltrate Cuba in the 1980s? Soon Conde discovers unexpected connections, secret businesses and a history of misfortune, uprooting and loneliness that affected many immigrant families from China. The Barrio Chino was once one of the largest Chinatowns in the West. Now it feels like a ghetto of uprooted families, with its derelict cemetery and boarded-up shops. The story is soaked in atmosphere: African spells cast by babalao sorcerers, deliciously smoke-filled bars, deep friendships, and beautiful women. Especially the exotic Afro-Chinese Patricia Chion.

A journalist and assistant in a veterinary clinic, flashes back towards an episode in his life when he met a man who used to walk by the beach with two Russian dogs. After several meetings, the man said Jaime Lopez was his name, and began to tell him his confidences focusing on the figure of Trotsky's murderer, Ramon Mercader, of whom he claims have been friends.

When a human skeleton is discovered on Ernest Hemingway's home in Havana, police inspector Mario Conde is called up out of retirement to unearth the truth. In the course of his investigations, Conde gradually reconstructs the mysterious goings-on of the night of 3rd October 1958 and in doing so is forced to come to terms with a very different side to the character of his former literary hero. Padura Fuentes cleverly cuts between Conde's world and that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier. In the heat and rum haze, the two seem slowly to merge as the reader is taken on an extraordinary journey into the past and into the personality of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic and interesting writers. It's a masterful and totally convincing portrait that emerges, as well as a riveting mystery that keeps the reader on tenterhooks until the very final pages.

Fernando Terry returns to Havana for a month, after eighteen years in exile, lured by the possibility of finding "La novela de mi vida, the lost memoirs of the poet Jose Maria Heredia. The novel also happens in two other temporal planes: Heredia's life at the beginning of the 19th century, and that of his son. Jose de Jesus de Heredia, a mason who lived at the beginning of the 20th century. Gradually, the lives of the characters create unsuspected parallelisms, as if Cuban history finds outlets for its fury on the individual destinies of those who stand out for their talent: accusations, exiles and political intrigues have a place in the lives of all creators, regardless of the historical period in which they live. This book is a history of Cuba and a trip to the root of its national conscience through the life of its first great poet.

A gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940

In "The Man Who Loved Dogs," Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramon Mercader.

The story revolves around Ivan Cardenas Maturell, who in his youth was the great hope of modern Cuban literature--until he dared to write a story that was deemed counterrevolutionary. When we meet him years later in Havana, Ivan is a loser: a humbled and defeated man with a quiet, unremarkable life who earns his modest living as a proofreader at a veterinary magazine. One afternoon, he meets a mysterious foreigner in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. This is "the man who loved dogs," and as the pair grow closer, Ivan begins to understand that his new friend is hiding a terrible secret.

Moving seamlessly between Ivan's life in Cuba, Ramon's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, "The Man Who Loved Dogs "is Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet. This is a story about political ideals tested and characters broken, a multilayered epic that effortlessly weaves together three different plot threads-- Trotsky in exile, Ramon in pursuit, Ivan in frustrated stasis--to bring emotional truth to historical fact.

A novel whose reach is matched only by its astonishing successes on the page, "The Man Who Loved""Dogs "lays bare the human cost of abstract ideals and the insidious, corrosive effects of life under a repressive political regime.

"If baseball is really a metaphor for life, then Kill the Ampaya -- Dick Cluster's wonderful collection of Latin American baseball stories -- is an astonishing record of its beauty and coarseness, redemption and tragedy. You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate these stories, each one hinged on baseball directly or indirectly, and delight in this reading."-Achy Obejas, author of The Tower of Antilles and Other Stories "These are stories we have lived...Some are funny, some cruel or violent, but in the end they are part of our culture that makes us act the way we do. They make me think of the millions of stories that got lost behind us." -Omar Vizquel, from Venezuela, one of baseball's all-time best fielding shortstops who played for the Seattle Mariners, Cleveland Indians, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox, and Toronto Blue Jays. "Baseball is in the soul of millions in Puerto Rico and the other countries that play the game with a Latino flair. These stories are portraits of its place in our lives." -Benjie Molina, former Texas Rangers catcher and first base coach. A rich variety of baseball fiction exists south of the Florida Straits and the Rio Grande, but almost none available in English. This collection translates for the first time stories ranging from the highly literary to the vernacular. These inventive and entertaining stories reveal the place of baseball in Latin America. Mixing fan and fandom, baseball and politics, rural and urban life, sexism and poverty, Kill the Ampaya! reveals how baseball shapes the social fabric of everyday Latin American life. The collection includes well known writers such as Leonardo Padura from Cuba (The Man Who Loved Dogs), Sergio Ramirez from Nicaragua (Divine Punishment, A Thousand Deaths Plus One). Others are well known writers in their home countries such as Arturo Arango and Eduardo del Llano in Cuba, Alexis Gomez Rosa and Jose Bobadilla in the Dominican Republic, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro in Puerto Rico, Vicente Lenero in Mexico as well as emerging literary figures such as Salvador Flejan and Rodrigo Blanco Calderon in Venezuela, Sandra Tavarez and Daniel Reyes German in the D.R., Carmen Hernandez Pena in Cuba.

The first of the Havana quartet featuring Inspector Mario Conde, a tropical Marlowe. A young transvestite in a beautiful red dress is found strangled in a Havana park. Conde's investigation into a violent murder exposes a stifling, corrupt society, a Cuban reality where nothing is what it seems. A dark and fascinating world of men and women born in the revolution who live without dreaming of exile and seek their identity in the midst of disaster.

Lieutenant Mario Conde is suffering from a terrible New Year's Eve hangover. Though it's the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a "reliable comrade'' who always got what he wanted, including Tamara, the girl Conde was after. But Rafael Morin's exemplary rise from a poor barrio and picture-perfect life hides more than one suspicious episode worthy of investigation. While pursuing the case in a decaying but adored Havana, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and the dreams and illusions of his generation.

This unusual collaboration between a Cuban novelist and a Canadian professor offers uncensored and frank interviews with prominent figures of contemporary Cuban cultural life, from a Grammy-winning jazz artist to world-class filmmakers and actors, writers, ballet dancers, and dramatists.

In recent years the small island, with a population of just 11 million, has experienced an astonishing cultural renaissance. The immense popularity of the movies Buena Vista Social Club and Strawberry and Chocolate, the successful international tours of the National Ballet of Cuba, and a host of literary prizes in Spain and Latin America attest to this phenomenon.

The thirteen people interviewed played a leading role in cultural life during the years of the revolutionary process and today are considered official Cuban figures -- Silvio Rodriguez, Anton Arrufat, Alicia Alonso, Abelardo Estorino, Chucho Valdes, Pablo Armando Fernandez, Leo Brouwer, Nancy Morejon, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Roberto Fabelo, Frank Fernandez, Fernando Perez, and Jorge Perugorria. They discuss a range of topics -- their own work and limits on it, the challenge of producing art in a poor country, and threats of censorship. All state categorically that they feel a profound sense of national identity and an acute awareness of their role as cultural symbol.

Together, these candid interviews offer a unique perspective on the artist and intellectual in socialist society and an overview of the dynamic expression of popular culture in Cuba today.

A woman was beaten, raped and then strangled with a towel. Marijuana is found in her apartment and her wardrobe is suspiciously beyond the means of a high school teacher. Grand buildings and secrets hidden behind faded doors and corruption. This story in Cuba, its life of sex, music and great friendships as it is a story of a murder investigation.