A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice

Havana, 1957. On the same day that the Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia is assassinated in a barber's chair in New York, a hippopotamus escapes from the zoo and is shot and killed by its pursuers. Assigned to cover the zoo story, Joaquin Porrata, a young Cuban journalist, finds himself embroiled in the mysterious connections between the hippo's death and the mafioso's in this intoxicating story of murder, mobsters, and, finally, love.

From the author of "The Last Night I Spent With You" comes "a captivating tale of love, politics, and death" ("The Charlotte Observer")
 
For fifty years, Andres Yasin has carried a grudge against J. T. Bunker. Now eighty-three-years-old and dying, Bunker wants to tell his side of the story, the story of his affair with Estela, Andres's mother. As a child Andres knew Bunker as the "Captain of the Sleepers"--so called because he transported back to Vieques those who had died on the mainland but wished to be buried at home. But what really happened between Bunker and Estela, and between Estela and her one true love, a leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement? What did Andres witness, and what were the real circumstances of his mother's mysterious death?
 
Beautifully translated by Edith Grossman, "Captain of the Sleepers" is a startling tale of remembrance and reality, and Mayra Montero's finest book yet.

The quest for an elusive amphibian in the mountains of violence-torn Haiti brings together an unlikely pair of hunters--American herpetologist Victor Grigg and his Haitian guide, Thierry Adrien--whose individual stories unfold and intertwine in a mesmerizing tale of love, sex, and fraternal rivalry; of the propagation and extinction of species in the natural world; and of the mysterious forces of nature that govern the fate of all living creatures.

In the Palm of Darkness is a compelling tale that reads like a murder mystery but also reveals a highly sophisticated and refined literary voice.