Last Seen in Havana
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Cuban American woman searches for her long-lost mother and fights to restore a beautiful but crumbling Art Deco home in the heart of Havana in this moving, immersive new mystery, perfect for fans of Of Women and Salt.
Newly widowed baker Mercedes Spivey flies from Miami to her native Cuba in 2019 to care for her ailing paternal grandmother. Mercedes’s life has been shaped by loss, beginning with the mysterious unsolved disappearance of her mother when Mercedes was a little girl. Returning to Cuba revives Mercedes’s hopes of finding her mother as she attempts to piece together the few scraps of information she has. Could her mother still be alive?
Thirty-three years earlier, in 1986, an American college student with endless political optimism falls deliriously in love with a handsome Cuban soldier while on a spontaneous visit to the island. She decides to stay permanently, but soon discovers that nothing is as it seems in Havana.
The two women’s stories proceed in parallel as Mercedes gets closer to the truth about her mother, uncovering shocking family secrets in the process . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mercedes Spivey is haunted by images of her long-departed mother, Tania, in this bighearted entry in Dovalpage's Havana Series (after Death Under the Perseids). As a child in her native Cuba, Mercedes felt abandoned by Tania, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when Mercedes was very young. A short time later, her father was deployed to Angola to fight in that country's civil war and killed, leaving Mercedes to be raised by her paternal grandmother. Now living in Miami, Mercedes returns to Havana to care for her grandmother in the crumbling villa where her family once lived. The return to Cuba revives Mercedes's interest in resolving her mother's disappearance, and as she follows the little evidence available to her, she begins to wonder if her mom might still be alive. Told in chapters that alternate between Mercedes's perspective in the present day and Tania's in the early 1980s, the novel adroitly juxtaposes Mercedes's unwavering devotion to finding the truth with Tania's slow slide from idealism to disillusionment as Castro's socialist regime falls short of its promises. Armchair travelers will savor Dovalpage's detailed depiction of Cuba, and the heartbreaking ending will stay with readers long after they turn the last page. Dovalpage delivers the goods.
