DANCING TO 'ALMENDRA' - Tapa blanda

"I devoured it with absolute delight, and I'm looking forward to reading it again, and to reading anything Montero might come up with next." --The New York Times Book Review

"Montero exploits true crime, romance, family drama, cabaret, and even danzón. . . . Her new novel is a hell of a song." --San Francisco Chronicle

"[Montero] has crafted a story of pre-revolutionary Havana that crackles with violence, mystery, and a truly eccentric view of love. Imagine Raymond Carver crossed with Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"An extremely stylish novel . . . Montero is an energetic writer and Grossman's translation renders her prose into a wry, bawdy, delicious rhythm. . . . Here is a story of [Montero's] native country, marching toward the future one murder, one one-night stand, one dead hippo at a time. It's even more fun than it sounds." --The Star-Ledger (Newark)

"Montero has delivered a well-written, cinematic story that fairly steps off the page. Think Chinatown set in the late 1950s, pre-Castro Cuba." --The Plain Dealer

"Masterful . . . What a story! Montero has played her usual sleight of hand." --Houston Chronicle

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.