Praise for Sacrificio
The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2022
Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Notable Fall Literary Fiction
A Publishers Weekly U.S. Book Show Editors’ Pick for Adult Fiction
“Sacrificio is an explosive, propulsive, utterly captivating novel. It is a feast of ideas and ideals, intrigue and passion, love and revolution; but above all it is a feast of language. You won’t be able to put it down, and even if you could you wouldn’t want to.”
—Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost
“Compelling and sinuous, bleak and darkly funny, Sacrificio is a book about queer desire, the mutability of language, and layer upon layer of deceit: self-deception, family betrayals, and the disinformation of spies and governments. Mestre-Reed’s prose is frenetic, wry, and utterly charming—I’d follow these characters anywhere.”
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
“Lush, dreamy descriptions contrast with grim fatalism in Sacrificio, a transcendent novel that catalogs the many ways that humans can hurt each other, and that a society can fall apart.”
—Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
“Mestre-Reed combines elements of a spy novel and political thriller with bleak, steely-eyed realism about Cuba in the 1990s . . . A compelling, melancholy novel that explores the beautiful rise and often violent breakdown of dreams, ideals, and love.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“A bold and suspenseful story of resistance in late 1990s Cuba . . . This tautly plotted story keeps the reader guessing until the end. Mestre-Reed succeeds at capturing life on the margins of Castro’s Cuba in this stirring tale.”
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for The Second Death of Única Aveyano
“Ernesto Mestre-Reed is a masterful observer, the creator of dazzling word portraits: here the manifold details of family and romantic life, the subtlest shift of facial expression, the minor disappointments of any day, the most elusive yet crushing emotion, are all captured in poetic and daring prose. This novel, the story-fable of one family caught up in the tragedy of contemporary Cuba, draws its authority and unforgettable emotional power from that luminous intimacy.”
—Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
“[A] weird and often wonderful novel . . . Funny and gut-wrenching.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A powerful, funny, resonant tale of one extraordinary woman and the many lives she graces and ruins. Unica Aveyano is as poignant and compelling and concentratedly Cubana as they come.”
—Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban
“Ernesto Mestre-Reed is among the most gifted and accomplished storytellers to emerge from the Cuban diaspora. Mestre-Reed’s Cubans—whether in exile or on the island—are as deftly drawn as Roth’s Jews of Newark. The Second Death of Única Aveyano makes clear to all this author’s soaring artistry and power.”
—Anna Louise Bardach, author of Cuba Confidential
“This book is important, even daring, in its weaving of the magical spiritual lives of its characters with historical and political realities surrounding them . . . The novel is gorgeously sculpted and breathtaking in its scope.”
—Carolyn Ferrell, author of Dear Miss Metropolitan
Praise for Ernesto Mestre-Reed
“A marvelously poetic meditation on time and memory . . . Ernesto Mestre-Reed has managed to write a work of fiction that, like all great art, both captures and transcends the life of its subject, and that has the capacity to transform for the better the lives of all who come in contact with it.”
—The Washington Post
“The enormous influence of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on Latin American literature bears its finest fruit so far in this stunning exploration of the Castro Revolutions roots, character, and consequences . . . dizzyingly complex . . . Seldom has the folly of utopian dreaming been dramatized with such fine frenzied ingenuity.”
—Kirkus Reviews
