In a few words
A classic detective story exploring the last years of Hemingway’s life – from one of Cuba’s most acclaimed writers
intelligent, moving and delightful...It makes you think and feel. What more can you ask for?...a lovely little novel.
Fact and fiction are seamlessly merged...
More about
the book
A classic detective story that explores the last years of Hemingway’s life, evoking both Cuba and this giant of American letters with enormous skill and wit. When the bones of a man murdered forty years earlier surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, writer and ex-cop Mario Conde is called in to investigate. As he unearths the truth of the night of 3 October 1958, he is forced to come to terms with a very different side to his former literary hero.
Padura Fuentes switches between Conde’s world and that of Hemingway’s Cuba four decades earlier; in the heat and rum haze, the two seem slowly to merge. In an extraordinary journey into the past and into the personality of one of the twentieth century´s most enigmatic and powerful writers, a masterful and totally convincing portrait emerges, as well as a riveting mystery that will keep you in suspense until the very final pages.
. . . the gently melancholic tone, beautifully rendered here by John King, subverts any literal reading.
a well-paced and beautifully characterised detective story.
a superb piece of crime literature...a thrilling and engaging mystery.
beautifully recreates a complicated and interesting man.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes
View profileLeonardo Padura Fuentes is one of Cuba’s most acclaimed writers. He was born in 1955, not far from Hemingway’s Cuban home and has written extensively as a critic and essayist, as well as novelist. A winner of the international Dashiell Hammett prize, his books include a series of detective novels featuring Mario Conde.
