New Releases by MARGARITA ENGLE

"Carmen Peregrin, conceived in the jungles of Cuba and raised in the California desert, is the child of two rebels betrayed by their revolution. All her life Carmen has dreamed of the Cuban half brother she has never met. At last, during the hurricane season, she arrives in Old Havana to meet him, finding Camilo is not as she has imagined him all these years. By morning he is gone, setting out for freedom across ninety miles of sea on a raft made of inner tubes bound together by twine and hope." "Carmen waits with Camilo''s mother - the stoic Marisol, herself a onetime revolutionary - for news of his fate on the daily broadcasts from Miami''s Radio Marti, but his name does not appear on the list of balseros who have survived the crossing. Instead, once Carmen has reluctantly returned home to North America, she learns that Camilo has disappeared deep within the belly of the Viper, Cuba''s most infamous prison. His fate lends a darker urgency to the package he has asked her to smuggle into the United States, to be opened once she is safely out of Cuba." "Back in the States, as she struggles to make contact with Marisol and to buy Camilo''s release, Carmen opens the mysterious packet - and with it, a door into the past. She finds a 500-year-old chronicle of her family''s history, tales of the unquiet ghosts of her renegade father, assassinated before her birth; of the ancestor who escaped the Inquisition to seek pearls and cinnamon across the sea and married a beautiful and enigmatic Cuban Indian; of the martyred Cuban poet Jose Marti, who sang of love, homeland, freedom, and music; of Cuba itself and its long history of outrages and absurdities, dreams and tyrannies."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"A journey into the past reveals the terrifying truth that destroyed a family. A California farm wife leaves her husband and children to search for the truth about family members caught up in the turmoil of the Castro revolution. She encounters much more than she expected, as her family''s tragedy becomes her own personal drama, cast in a modern mystery play of good versus evil, angels versus demons." "An account of the imprisonment of her great uncle Gabriel, once a Castro supporter, swept away by the so-called "Secret War" against the Cuban peasants early in the revolution, sets the mood for this lyrical novel told in the Latin American style of magical realism. The magic, but all too real paradox, is a Cuba where the splendor of natural beauty coexists with moral evil."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved