The Lazarus Rumba - Tapa blanda

"Mestre manages to interpret the magic realist tradition in his own distinctive manner . . . [His] symphonic imagination proves mesmerizing."--"The New York Times Book Review"
""The Lazarus Rumba" is a wonderful first novel . . . worthy of our best-known Latin American fabulists. With a fresh imagination and a command of the mischief words can create . . . it is Mestre's inventive extravagance that sets this book apart from others."--"The Los Angeles Times"
"A dense, complicated and rich first novel . . . thoroughly original."--"The Cleveland Plain Dealer"
"Concerns the impact of the Cuban revolution on its champions and on those who resist it. The term magic realism doesn't cover it; this is twentieth-century history as both dream and trauma. Like that other Alice, the brave Alicia Lucientes is adrift in a nightmare wonderland, this one populated by a resurrecting rooster, a bovine inamorata, as well as martyrs, terrorists and contortionists--in short, the whole proud and damned lot of us, who we are and who we hope to be . . .[It] revives our hopes that the epic novel can be lyrical, comic, and sexy as hell, and still remain unapologetically political. And why not? Cuba is a country, but it is also a family, and this family saga has the breath of history to inspire it."--Gregory Maguire author of "Wicked: The Life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West"
"His prose has an uncommon exuberance that captures the lushness of his tropical setting . . . a talent to watch."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Magnificent . . . His episodic voices alternate between the vibrant and the ghostly, the gentle and the gross."--"Library Journal"
"Mestre has a baroque voice all his own that mixes fable, epic, family saga and stream-of-consciousness."--"Newsweek.com"
"The enormous influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude "on Latin American literature bears its finest fruit so far in this stunning exploration of the C

A debut novel set in Cuba following Castro's revolutionary upheaval describes a country confused and dislocated through the eyes of three generations of women in the Lucientes family. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.