Vital Signs

Winner of Cuba’s prestigious Premio Carpentier, this collection of eight inventive stories explores the pursuit of love and meaning in contemporary Cuba. One story takes you into a world of art and the marketplace, another into divination and the numbers racket, another into cooking and S&M. These characters inhabit a real country full of contradictions and compulsions, far from our stereotyped images of nightclubs, beards, beaches and American cars. They are survivors, brought to us by a narrator who is sympathetic yet ironic, incisive yet serene.