Recommendations based on "Telex from Cuba A Novel"

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray comes a gripping, extraordinary portrait of love, silence, and secrets under a Spanish dictatorship.Madrid, 1957. Under the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Spain is hiding a dark secret. Meanwhile, tourists and foreign businessmen flood into Spain under the welcoming promise of sunshine and wine. Among them is eighteen-year-old Daniel Matheson, the son of an oil tycoon, who arrives in Madrid with his parents hoping to connect with the country of his mother's birth through the lens of his camera. Photography--and fate--introduce him to Ana, whose family's interweaving obstacles reveal the lingering grasp of the Spanish Civil War--as well as chilling definitions of fortune and fear. Daniel's photographs leave him with uncomfortable questions amidst shadows of danger. He is backed into a corner of difficult decisions to protect those he loves. Lives and hearts collide, revealing an incredibly dark side to the sunny Spanish city.Master storyteller Ruta Sepetys once again shines light into one of history's darkest corners in this epic, heart-wrenching novel about identity, unforgettable love, repercussions of war, and the hidden violence of silence--inspired by the true postwar struggles of Spain.Includes vintage media reports, oral history commentary, photos, and more.Praise for The Fountains of Silence"Spain under Francisco Franco is as dystopian a setting as Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in Ruta Sepetys’s suspenseful, romantic and timely new work of historical fiction . . . Like [Shakespeare's family romances], 'The Fountains of Silence' speaks truth to power, persuading future rulers to avoid repeating the crimes of the past." --The New York Times Book Review“Full of twists and revelations…an excellent story, and timely, too.” --The Wall Street Journal"A staggering tale of love, loss, and national shame." --Entertainment Weekly* "[Sepetys] tells a moving story made even more powerful by its placement in a lesser-known historical moment. Captivating, deft, and illuminating historical fiction." --Booklist, *STARRED REVIEW** "This gripping, often haunting historical novel offers a memorable portrait of fascist Spain." --Publishers Weekly, *STARRED REVIEW** "This richly woven historical fiction . . . will keep young adults as well as adults interested from the first page to the last." --SLC, *STARRED REVIEW** "Riveting . . . An exemplary work of historical fiction." --The Horn Book, *STARRED REVIEW*

Lavinia is The Inhabited Woman: accomplished, independent, and fiercely modern. She is sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being, then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and—through the power of love—finds the courage to act.The Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America.

'The best kind of book: the one you didn't know you were craving until it appeared . . . self-interrogative, intricately perceptive. I absolutely inhaled it' JIA TOLENTINO 'A very richly interesting exploration of a complex subject. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz tells the stories with such intelligence and wit and generosity' TESSA HADLEY When it comes to children: a man leaves, a woman abandons Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Maria Montessori, Joni Mitchell ... what do these vastly different women have in common? During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who were able to overcome both society's judgement and their own maternal instincts in order to leave their children. More than anything, she was fascinated by her own prejudice towards these women, so clearly tied up in a much wider cultural bias. Using famous examples including Doris Lessing, fictional ones such as Anna Karenina, and interrogating modern trends like Momfluencers, Begoña reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women. 'The best book I've read on the implications of motherhood and its opposites after Sheila Heti's Motherhood' CLAUDIA DURASTANTI

Part memoir, part lies, this imaginative tale is a story about loving a woman made of paper, about the wounds made by first love and sharp objects.

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse.LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, New York Public Library, BookPage, and BookRiot • “Quiara Alegría Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the HeightsQuiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio—even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories—but first she’d have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She’d have to find her language.Weaving together Hudes’s love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging—narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.

The award-winning biography of an undocumented teen mother's struggle with US immigration: "A rich, novelistic [and] illuminating work of literature" (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times Book Review). One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time In 1987, Aida Hernandez was born in Agua Prieta, Mexico. At the time, the nearby US border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida's mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at sixteen, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. Instead, Aida was separated from her son and deported to a Mexican city marked by violence. The daughter of a rebel hero from the mountains of Chihuahua, Aida embarked on a harrowing journey to reunite with her son. But returning to the United States was just the beginning of her quest. Taking us into detention centers, immigration courts, and the inner lives of Aida and other daring characters, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez reveals the human consequences of militarizing what was once a more forgiving border. Author Aaron Bobrow-Strain brings us into the heart of a violently unequal America, showing that the people caught in today's immigrations wars are flawed, complex humans who deserve justice and empathy. Winner of the 2020 Pacific Northwest Book Award Winner of the 2020 Washington State Book Award Named a 2019 Southwest Book of the Year

Combining the haunting power of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with the evocative atmosphere of Phillippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s groundbreaking novel illuminates a little discussed aspect of history—the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade—witnessed through the experiences of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear more slaves. A Woman of Endurance, set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican plantation society, follows Pola, a deeply spiritual African woman who is captured and later sold for the purpose of breeding future slaves. The resulting babies are taken from her as soon as they are born. Pola loses the faith that has guided her and becomes embittered and defensive. The dehumanizing violence of her life almost destroys her. But this is not a novel of defeat but rather one of survival, regeneration, and reclamation of common humanity.  Readers are invited to join Pola in her journey to healing. From the sadistic barbarity of her first experiences, she moves on to receive compassion and support from a revitalizing new community. Along the way, she learns to recognize and embrace the many faces of love—a mother’s love, a daughter’s love, a sister’s love, a love of community, and the self-love that she must recover before she can offer herself to another. It is ultimately, a novel of the triumph of the human spirit even under the most brutal of conditions. 

The prizewinning writer Luis Alberto Urrea's long-awaited novel is an epic mystical drama of a young woman's sudden sainthood in late 19th-century Mexico.It is 1889, and civil war is brewing in Mexico. A 16-year-old girl, Teresita, illegitimate but beloved daughter of the wealthy and powerful rancher Don Tomas Urrea, wakes from the strangest dream--a dream that she has died. Only it was not a dream. This passionate and rebellious young woman has arisen from death with a power to heal--but it will take all her faith to endure the trials that await her and her family now that she has become the Saint of Cabora.THE HUMMINGBIRD?S DAUGHTER is a vast, hugely satisfying novel of love and loss, joy and pain. Two decades in the writing, this is the masterpiece that Luis Alberto Urrea has been building up to.

Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes: Eyes of a Blue Dog,Big Mama's Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of lnnocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.

Allende tackles her homeland head-on in this staggering, epic romance. 'Portrait in Sepia' is both a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the 19th-century in Chile and a marvellous family saga peopled by characters from 'Daughter of Fortune' and 'The House of the Spirits', two of Allende's most celebrated novels. As a young girl, Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that has shaped her character and erased from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what it was, exactly, all those years ago, that had such a devastating effect on her young life. Richly detailed, epic in scope, this engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.