Translation Rights TQE / The Captain of the Sleeping

Mayra Montero, already consecrated by the critics and the public, has enriched our catalogue ever since 1991. Each of her novels has the capacity of revealing a different world, without deviating from a particular literary journey, very much her own, whose voice is unmistakable. With El Capitán de los Dormidos she surprises us once again with her capacity to transmit what can not be transmitted literally.

It is October 1950. Andrés Yasín is a twelve-year-old boy that lives in the Puerto Rican island of Vieques and who faces a double tragedy: on one hand, the nationalist revolt in which his father —the owner of a beach hotel— partakes, whose bloody outcome will mark his family forever; on the other hand, the sudden death of his mother. Only one man, John Timothy Bunker, an American aviator, a regular at the hotel, can explain the truth about a certain monstrous image that Andrés has seen, or has believed to see. Andrés and John, who the boy once baptized as Captain of the Sleeping, finally meet up in Santa Cruz, the largest of the Virgin Islands, fifty years after those events. From the conversation between them, from their mutual confessions, surfaces the true key of a story of love and regret: an old passion that remits to death, and that only from death can be understood and forgiven.

Mayra Montero was born in Havana in 1952 and has lived in Puerto Rico for over thirty years. She is the author of the erotic novels La última noche que pasé contigo (The Last Night I Spent with You, finalist for the XIII Sonrisa Vertical Prize in 1991) and Púrpura profundo (Deep Purple, XXII Sonrisa Vertical Prize in 2000), as well as of the novels Del rojo de su sombra (From the Red of His Shadow, 1993), Tú, la oscuridad (You, the Darkness, 1995), which established her internationally as a writer after being published in the United States, Como un mensajero tuyo (As Your Messenger, 1998), El capitán de los dormidos (The Captain of the Sleeping, 2002), and Son de almendra (Almond Song, 2006).