Never before available in English, The Halfway House is a trip to the darkest corners of the human condition. Humiliations, filth, stench, and physical abuse comprise the asphyxiating atmosphere of a halfway house for indigents in Miami where, in a shaken mental state, the writer William Figueras lives after his exile from Cuba. He claims to have gone crazy after the Cuban government judged his first novel "morose, pornographic, and also irreverent, because it dealt harshly with the Communist Party," and prohibited its publication. By the time he arrives in Miami twenty years later, he is a "toothless, skinny, frightened guy who had to be admitted to a psychiatric ward that very day" instead of the ready-for-success exile his relatives expected to welcome and receive among them. Placed in a halfway house, with its trapped bestial inhabitants and abusive overseers, he enters a hell. Romance appears in the form of Frances, a mentally fragile woman and an angel, with whom he tries to escape in this apocalyptic classic of Cuban literature. "Behind the hardly one hundred pages," Canarias Diario stated, "is the work of a tireless fabulist, a writer who delights in language, extracting verbs and adjectives which are powerful enough to stop the reader in his tracks."

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.

An audacious "biography" of the ex-president of Cuba told in Castro's own outrageous, bombastic voice. Prize-winning author and journalist Norberto Fuentes was once a revolutionary: a writer with privileged access to Fidel Castro's inner circle during some the most challenging years of the revolution. But in the late 1990s, as the regime began sending its oldest comrades to the firing squad, he became A Man Who Knew Too Much. Escaping a death sentence and now living in exile, Fuentes has written a brilliant, satirical, and utterly captivating "autobiography" of the Cuban leader-in Fidel's own arrogant and seductive language-discussing everything from Castro's early sexual experiences in Biran to his true feelings about Che Guevara and his philosophy on murder, legacy, and state secrets. Critics have long admired Fuentes's writing; one U.S. article called him "Norman Mailer's Cuban pen pal." Akin to Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, or Edmund Morris's Dutch, this wickedly entertaining, true-to-life masterpiece is as imaginative and outsized as Castro himself.

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.

Leapfrog depicts one summer in the life of a very poor young boy in post-revolutionary Havana in the late 50s. He has superhero fantasies, hangs around with the neighborhood kids, smokes cigarettes, tells very lame jokes: By the way, do you know who died? No. Someone who was alive. Laughter. The kids fight, discuss the mysteries of religion and sex, and play games such as leapfrog. So vivid and so very credible, Leapfrog reads as if Rosales had simply transcribed everything that he d heard or said for this one moving and touching book about a lost childhood.

Leapfrog was a finalist for Cuba s prestigious Casa de las Americas award in 1968. Years later, Rosales s sister told The Miami Herald that Rosales felt he hadn t won the prize because his book lacked sufficient leftist fervor, and that subtle critiques of cruel children and hypocritical adults throughout the playful recollections had clearly rankled state officials. In the end the novel never appeared in Cuba. It was first published in Spain in 1994, a year after Rosales s death."