Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government.Cuba, 1998: Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon drawn into a web of ever-shifting entanglements with his boss’s son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group “Los Injected Ones,” which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit.
When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones.
A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse,
Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.
"Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government."--Provided by publisher.
Praise for The Second Death of Única Aveyano
“Ernesto Mestre-Reed is a masterful observer, the creator of dazzling word portraits: here the manifold details of family and romantic life, the subtlest shift of facial expression, the minor disappointments of any day, the most elusive yet crushing emotion, are all captured in poetic and daring prose. This novel, the story-fable of one family caught up in the tragedy of contemporary Cuba, draws its authority and unforgettable emotional power from that luminous intimacy.”
—Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
“[A] weird and often wonderful novel . . . Funny and gut-wrenching.”
—The New York Times Book Review “A powerful, funny, resonant tale of one extraordinary woman and the many lives she graces and ruins. Unica Aveyano is as poignant and compelling and concentratedly Cubana as they come.”
—Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban “Ernesto Mestre-Reed is among the most gifted and accomplished storytellers to emerge from the Cuban diaspora. Mestre-Reed's Cubans—whether in exile or on the island—are as deftly drawn as Roth's Jews of Newark. The Second Death of Única Aveyano makes clear to all this author's soaring artistry and power.”
—Anna Louise Bardach, author of Cuba Confidential “This book is important, even daring, in its weaving of the magical spiritual lives of its characters with historical and political realities surrounding them . . . The novel is gorgeously sculpted and breathtaking in its scope.”
—Carolyn Ferrell, author of Dear Miss Metropolitan
Praise for Ernesto Mestre-Reed“A marvelously poetic meditation on time and memory . . . Ernesto Mestre-Reed has managed to write a work of fiction that, like all great art, both captures and transcends the life of its subject, and that has the capacity to transform for the better the lives of all who come in contact with it.”
—The Washington Post“The enormous influence of Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude on Latin American literature bears its finest fruit so far in this stunning exploration of the Castro Revolutions roots, character, and consequences . . . dizzyingly complex . . . Seldom has the folly of utopian dreaming been dramatized with such fine frenzied ingenuity.”
—Kirkus Reviews
