Love and Ghost Letters A Novel [Paperback]

On the day she is born, Josefina Navarro's nursemaid foretells misfortune. But for the young socialite in pre-Castro Cuba, her life in Havana with her Sergeant of police father is idyllic. That is, until she falls in love with Lorenzo, a penniless man who takes her away to the impoverished town of El Cotorro, and her father disowns her. Josefina comes to wish her father dead but regrets it after the Sergeant is assumed killed in a student-led riot. One day, mysterious letters from the Sergeant begin to arrive, telling her the truth about his past. The ghostly letters become her link to love.

Set in Miami and Cuba and covering nearly fifty years of that island's history,Love and Ghost Lettersunfolds the lives of the members of the Navarro-Concepci?n families in the patterns and permutations of memory, and conjures a Cuban setting that evokes mysticism and magic.

Chantel Acevedo is a first-generation Cuban-American whose childhood combined American modernity with traditional Cuban values. She attended the M.F.A. creative writing program at the University of Miami on a James Michener Fellowship. She has won two Fulbright Awards for secondary education.

[An] exceptionally fine first novel&. Acevedo shapes each of her characters with clear-eyed reverence, guiding their steps in measured, lyrical prose that is often breath-taking, exquisite&. And this is the author's genius: the line she walks between fact and fairy tale, history and wistful story, the magic that radiates, naturally, from the quirks and coincidences of daily life and what is (often) too easily celebrated--or dismissed--as otherworldly, supernatural. A. Manette Ansay for The Chicago Tribune

Acevedo is a fine storyteller&. [Love and Ghost Letters] unfolds with a leisurely pleasure that feels like magic realism. Christian Science Monitor

Acevedo, a first-generation Cuban-American, lyrically illustrates the changing social, economic and pol3i