Review

Havana Red

By Leonardo Padura

Published by Bitter Lemon Press

The first of the Havana quartet featuring Lieutenant Mario Conde, a tropical Marlowe.

A body is found in a Havana park - a young transvestite dressed in a beautiful red evening dress, strangled. The victim had fled his family, finding refuge with Marqués, a forgotten man in his own country, an author and theatre director once condemned by his government for being a 'heretical homosexual', living alone surrounded only by books, his house in ruins.

In the baking heat of the Havana summer, Conde moves through a Cuban reality where nothing is what it seems, a dark, fascinating world of men and women born in the Revolution who live without dreaming of exile and seek their identity in the midst of disaster.

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Translator: Peter Bush