Translation Rights TQE / The Novel of My Life

Leonardo Padura, following the cycle of crime novels with Lieutenant Conde as the protagonist, gives a risky turn of the screw to his literary trajectory that definitively establishes him as one of the most important novelists of the new Cuban narrative. La novela de mi vida, undoubtedly his most ambitious work, is a living evocation of Caribbean Romanticism in the Colonial period, as well as the recreation of the Masonic loggias that survive the passing of time, but above all it is a history of Cuba, a trip to the root of its national conscience through the life of its first great poet.

Turned into the police, fired from his position at the University, and after eighteen years in exile, Fernando Terry decides to return to Havana for a month, lured by the possibility of finally finding La novela de mi vida, the disappeared autobiography of the poet to whom he dedicated his thesis, José María Heredia. He will also take advantage of facing the suspicions that have fed his grudge once and for all. To the story of this meeting and the search for the desired manuscript, two more temporal planes that are added: Heredia’s life at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, during the Colonial years, and the last days of his son José de Jesús de Heredia, a mason, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Gradually, the lives of the characters and their vicissitudes create unsuspected parallelisms, as if Cuban History find expression for its fury on the individual destiny of anyone who stands out for his talent: accusations, exiles, political intrigues seem unavoidable for all creators, regardless of the historical period which they lived.

Leonardo Padura was born in Havana in 1955. He obtained a degree in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Havana, and has worked as a scriptwriter, journalist, and critic. He is the author of essays, collections of short stories, and of La novela de mi vida (The Novel of My Life) about the poet José María Heredia, but is best known for his series of crime novels starring Detective Mario Conde. These have been translated into many languages, and have won prestigious literary awards such as the Café Gijón Prize in 1995, the Hammett Prize for best crime novel in 1997, 1998, and 2005, the Premio de las Islas, in 2000, in France, the Brigada 21 Prize to the best novel of the year, as well as several editions of the Cuban Critics Prize and the National Prize for Novel in 1993. The Mario Conde series, acclaimed by readers and critics alike, is thus far made up of six novels: Pasado perfecto (Past Perfect), Vientos de cuaresma (Lenten Winds), Máscaras (Masks), Paisaje de otoño (Autumn Landscape), Adiós, Hemingway (Good-bye, Hemingway) and La neblina del ayer (The Mist of Yesterday). In all of them, “el Conde” investigates cases that bring the reader to the heart of contemporary Cuba.