Sugar and Ashes

Joaquín Valdés-Montoro is thirty-six years old in 1958, the master of a sugar mill that has been in his family for three generations. By 1961 he is a clerical worker in a Hialeah hardware wholesaler, practicing the English word thirsty into a kitchen mirror at night. By 2003 he is the last man at a desk in a Coral Gables study, opening a box his late wife left him and discovering, fifty years after the fact, what she had been writing down all along.

Spanning the burning of a cane field in spring 1957 to a granddaughter's first words in March 2002, Sugar and Ashes is a quiet, exacting novel about what a man carries when his country can no longer carry him — about marriage, brothers, exile, the slow architecture of a life rebuilt in a borrowed language, and the small invisible seam where one country joins another.

A debut of remarkable restraint and emotional precision.