The Sugar Island

Ivonne Lamazares’s distinguished debut novel is "at once a deeply personal and worldly tale . . . a wonderful amalgamation of culture, politics, and love" (Philadelphia Weekly). With economical prose and a clear-eyed vision, Lamazares evokes lives full of hope but fraught with obstacles in this story of a mother and daughter in 1960s Cuba. The story is told in the brave, tough voice of Tanya, a girl at odds with her mother and with the rapidly changing world around her. In the wake of Castro’s revolution, Tanya's mother -- passionate and unreliable -- is determined to leave Cuba at all costs and to take her reluctant daughter with her. THE SUGAR ISLAND presents their embattled relationship against the backdrop of a country in conflict with itself, where the old world chafes against the new and where a parent’s desperate grab for freedom has dire consequences for her child.

“Ivonne Lamazares’s fresh, clear voice and lyrical vision of Cuba past and present are a welcome addition to the New American Literature that’s developing fast along our borders from Miami to Los Angeles.” -- Russell Banks

“Ivonne Lamazares writes of the tug of history, the wrenching of families. In an intimate voice that is distinctly her own, this novel is a kind of cross between Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here. Writing of mothers and daughters in a world torn apart by politics, Ivonne Lamazares offers a dazzling new addition to Cuban-American literature.” -- Mary Morris

“Reading this magnificent first novel, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that Holden Caulfield had somehow ended up in revolutionary Cuba, transformed into a most irreverent teenage girl, brazen and stubborn and breathtakingly conTdent and keen-eyed, growing up in a society intent on breaking its own lovesick heart. THE SUGAR ISLAND is contemporary Tction at its best, prizewinning Tction, and Ivonne Lamazares is an unforgettable writer.” -- Bob Shacochis

". . . spare, lyrical, and brilliantly observant . . . life in Castro's Cuba . . . comes across clearly in the hands of this talented new writer." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"One of the most original renditions to date by a Cuban-American writer of the contemporary Cuba story." The Miami Herald

"worth reading for its . . . courageous main character, its striking relevance to recent . . . events, and its . . . sketches of Cuban . . . life." The Seattle Times