From the acclaimed author of Monkey Hunting (“A miracle of poetic compression . . . An epic of anecdotes, a vista of brief and beautiful glimpses” —Los Angeles Times Book Review), a lyrical, haunting, deeply moving new novel. Late 1960s. We meet three children: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father . . . Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador, forced to leave school to help support her family, her beloved older brother having already left home . . .Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon’s daughter in Tehran, her mother concerned only with appearances, her father an often foolishly vocal opponent of the Shah. As we follow them across the next twenty years—the narrative moving among their lives—we see Enrique, a math whiz from a young age, sacrificing his dream of attending MIT to filial duty, and the dream of passionate love to the exigencies of reality . . . Marta, fleeing war in El Salvador, making her way illegally into the United States and finding wholly unexpected possibilities . . . Leila, allowing the expectations of her mother to pull her into an arranged marriage and the constricted life of women in postrevolutionary Iran. We see chance draw Leila and Marta into Enrique’s life—Leila and Enrique loving and losing each other, Marta the means to renewed hope for Enrique—and, throughout, “good luck or bad tilting life one way or another” for all of them. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement through time and the psychological shifts between childhood and adulthood, and its subtle revelation of the essential hopes and doubts of ordinary people whose lives are made extraordinary by circumstance both tragic and joyful, A Handbook to Luck is Cristina García’s most beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel yet.

A Handbook to Luck

Literature & Fiction

GARCIA,CRISTINA

United States

KNOPF

In the late 60s, three teenagers from around the globe are making their way in the world: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon's daughter in Tehran. We follow them through the years, surviving war, disillusionment, and love, as their lives and paths intersect. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement through time, and the psychological shifts between childhood and adulthood, A Handbook to Luck is a beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel by beloved storyteller Cristina García.

A Handbook to Luck (Vintage Contemporaries)

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

A fines de los años sesenta, tres adolescentes de varios rincones del planeta tratan de encontrar su lugar en el mundo: el cubano Enrique Florit, que vive en el sur de California con su padre, un mago extravagante; Marta Claros, que se las arregla para subsistir en un tugurio de San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, hija de una acomodada familia de un cirujano en Teherán. Los seguimos de cerca mientras sobreviven guerras, desilusiones y amores, a medida que sus vidas y sus caminos se entrecruzan. Con un reparto de personajes vivamente retratados, una forma agraciada de moverse por el tiempo y aquellos cambios psicológicos que se suscitan entre la niñez y la madurez, Las caras de la suerte es una novela hermosa, melancólica y profundamente emotiva escrita por la estimada narradora de historias, Cristina García.

Las caras de la suerte / A Handbook to Luck (Spanish Edition)

Vintage Espanol

THE AGUERO SISTERS.

KNOPF. NY 1997

The Aguero Sisters (Spanish Edition)

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

Dreaming in Cuban

Ballantine Books

EL BESTSELLER NACIONAL • “Impresionante . . . Su historia se trata de tres generaciones de mujeres cubanas y sus reacciones por separado a la revolución. Su hazaña particular es la de contaria en un estilo tan caluroso y dulce como los ‘aromas continuos de la vainilla y la almendra,’ tan rítmico como la música de Beny Moré.”—Amelia Weiss, Time El celebrado libro de Cristina García cuenta la sobrecogedora y agridulce historia de una familia que experimenta la revolución de un país y las revelaciones que ello conlleva. La vidas de Celia del Pino y de su esposo, sus hijas y nietas reflejan el realismo mágico de Cuba, un paisaje de belleza y miseria, idealismo y corrupción. Soñar en cubano es “una obra que posee tanto la intimidad de un relato de Chejov como la magia alucinatoria de una novela de García Márquez” (The New York Times).

Soñar en cubano

Reina and Constancia Agüero are Cuban sisters who have been estranged for thirty years. Reina--tall, darkly beautiful, and magnetically sexual--still lives in her homeland. Once a devoted daughter of la revolución, she now basks in the glow of her many admiring suitors, believing only in what she can grasp with her five senses. The pale and very petite Constancia lives in the United States, a beauty expert who sees miracles and portents wherever she looks. After she and her husband retire to Miami, she becomes haunted by the memory of her parents and the unexplained death of her beloved mother so long ago. Told in the stirring voices of their parents, their daughters, and themselves, The Agüero Sisters tells a mesmerizing story about the power of myth to mask, transform, and finally, reveal the truth--as two women move toward an uncertain, long awaited reunion.

The Aguero Sisters: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

In this deeply stirring novel, acclaimed author Cristina García follows one extraordinary family through four generations, from China to Cuba to America. Wonderfully evocative of time and place, rendered in the lyrical prose that is García’s hallmark, Monkey Hunting is an emotionally resonant tale of immigration, assimilation, and the prevailing integrity of self.

Monkey Hunting: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The new novel—her first in six years—from the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters follows one family from China to Cuba to America in an emotionally resonant tale of immigration, assimilation, and the powerful integrity of self. In 1857, when Chen Pan signs a contract that will take him from China “beyond the edge of the world to Cuba,” he has no idea that he will be enslaved on a sugarcane plantation . . . or that he will eventually, miraculously, escape his bonds and embark on a prosperous life in Havana’s Chinatown . . . or that he will buy a mulatto woman out of slavery and take her into his home and heart . . . or that he will end his long days in Havana, surrounded by children and grandchildren, as Cuban as he is Chinese. In a vivid tapestry of incident and feeling, Chen Pan’s life story is interwoven with those of two of his descendants: his granddaughter, Chen Fang, born in China and raised as a boy so she could be educated, her life coming to its end in one of Mao’s hellish prisons, and Domingo, Chen Pan’s great-great-grandson, who, with his father, becomes an American citizen after Castro’s revolution, only to lose his parent to the false promises of the American dream, and himself, finally, to the madness of wartime Vietnam. Deeply stirring, wonderfully evocative of time and place, rendered in the lyrical prose that is Cristina García’s hallmark, Monkey Hunting brilliantly illuminates a generations-long struggle toward a sense of true belonging.

Monkey Hunting

Alfred.A. Knopf

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GARCIA,CRISTINA. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by GARCIA,CRISTINA