Translation Rights TQE / The Sleeping Seafarer

October 1977. In a big, old, wooden house on a distant beach, close to Havana, the Godínez women bolt the doors and windows and get ready for the arrival of what is supposed to be a devastating hurricane. Different generations of the family live in the old bungalow, an unexpected inheritance from Doctor Samuel O. Reefy, whom they had served for years. The old maid Mamina, who escaped from slavery, Andrea, who keeps to herself after the loss of some of her children, Colonel Jardinero, the patriarch who takes care of the animals, Olivero, who has had a past as a hustler, Uncle Mino, who cannot help being hooked on jazz… and the younger generations, who curse the city and the beach where they must live and look to the North as the Promised Land. These lives seem to be on hold, detained and waiting for something to happen (terrible or beneficial), and yet they are made up of dark tragedies, denials, and secrets that will become known as the hurricane makes its way. It will be the young Valeria who, thirty years later, will reconstruct the events of those October days from her Upper West Side apartment in New York City, while she watches the snow fall over the Hudson River. She will also remember how her cousin, a very young and determined Jafet, took advantage of the calmness before the storm and set out on an old boat, the Mayflower, to escape to the North.

Like a tragedy sustained by an absorbing rhythm, like a magnificent evocation of characters that embody part of a country’s history, El navegante dormido closes the cycle of three novels by one of the most original narrators in Spanish narrative.

About Tuyo es el reino

“A hugely ambitious effusion of magical realist mythmaking.”

Jon Gareick, The New York Times

“Enticing literary gamesmanship from a remarkably accomplished new novelist.”

Kirkus Review

“A debut novel that opens up new literary paths, as did Paradiso and One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia

“A verbal cataclysm, a magnificent earthquake, a literary epiphany.”

Miguel García-Posada, El País

“A clear abundance of faculties. It reveals both the firmness and looseness of a tale of impressing strength without hesitation, with complete control and confidence.”

Santos Sanz-Villanueva, El Mundo

About Los palacios distantes

“A profoundly subversive novel. The Tyrant is immortal, but so is man’s capacity to build distant and fantastic palaces, hidden from reality, especially when a writer can becomes the excellent architect of his re-found paradise.”

Raphaël Rérolle, Le Monde

“A desolate and beautiful work, full of radical poetry, that once again proves the talent of one of the best Latin American writers alive.”

Miguel García-Posada, Abc

Abilio Estévez was born in Havana in 1954 and currently lives in Barcelona. He has a degree in Hispanic Literature and Languages and also studied Philosophy in his native city. He has written two magnificent critically-acclaimed novels, Tuyo es el reino (Thine Is the Kingdom) -winner of the Cuban Critics Prize in 1999 and of the Best Foreign Book Award in France in 2000- and Los palacios distantes (The Distant Palaces) selected by the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia as the Book of the Year in 2004. Both novels have been translated into more than ten languages. He is also the author of a book of short stories, El horizonte y otros regresos (The Horizon and Other Ways Back) –Luis Cernuda Prize in 1986–, of the poetic prose Manual de tentaciones (Temptation Manual) –Cuban Critics Prize in 1987–, and of different plays, such as the monologues Ceremonias para actores desesperados (Ceremonies for Desperate Actors).