A HUNDRED FIRES IN CUBA / John Thorndike

Information

Author:

John Thorndike

Date:

August 2018

Author:

Additional Info

A HUNDRED FIRES IN CUBA

Rights Holder: April Eberhardt Literary
Original Language: English

2019 ERIC HOFFER AWARD FOR HISTORICAL FICTION!

Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018
"Thorndike is a talented, experienced writer, and Clare and Camilo especially are fully developed, attractive characters.... A highly recommended rendering of a love affair and mysterious slice of Cuban history." -(Starred review)

In the spring of 1956, a young American photographer falls in love with a Cuban line cook in New York. They have a ten-week affair which ends when Immigration arrests and deports him, and by then Clare Miller is pregnant. Few Americans know the name Camilo Cienfuegos. All Cubans do. He was the most charismatic of Castro’s rebel commanders. But Clare, who never hears from him after he’s deported, believes he has died in Fidel’s invasion of the island. She marries a wealthy Cuban businessman and moves to Cuba with her two-year-old daughter, only to discover that her first love is not only still alive, he’s head of the Cuban Army. Clare knows that Camilo likes to dance and drink. He likes women, and too many women like him. Though his courage is legendary, when he comes to visit at night he’s afraid of his daughter’s moods. He feeds her, he reads to her, he changes her diapers, but for him an all-night march would be easier. Clare worries that he’ll never make a good parent, but she cannot resist him.

John Thorndike went to Harvard, studied night and day, wrote some fiction, took an MA at Columbia, then lit out for Latin America. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and two, with his wife, on a backcountry farm in Chile. Eventually he settled with his son in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years his day job was farming. Then it was construction, but always he wrote. His first two books were novels, Anna Delaney’s Child and The Potato Baron. His first memoir, Another Way Home, speaks of his wife’s schizophrenia and his life as a single parent. His second, The Last of His Mind, chronicles his father’s year-long descent into Alzheimer’s. The Washington Post named this a Best Book of 2009, and Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it “a beautiful book.”

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