Translation Rights TQE / Lenten Winds

In the infernal days of the Cuban spring when the hot southern winds arrive, coinciding with Lent, Lieutenant Mario Conde, who has just met Karina, a beautiful and dazzling woman with a liking for jazz and the saxophone, is handed a delicate investigation. A young chemistry teacher from the same University where El Conde had studied years ago has been found murdered in her apartment, where traces of marihuana are found as well. Through the investigation of the life of the professor with an unpolluted academic and political record, El Conde enters a world that is decomposing, where social climbing, the traffic of influences, the consumption of drugs and fraud reveal the dark side of contemporary Cuban society. Meanwhile, the Lieutenant, in love with the beautiful and unexpected woman, lives days of glory without imagining the devastating outcome of the love story.

Already well-known thanks to Máscaras, Paisaje de otoño and Pasado perfecto Leonardo Padura gives us Vientos de Cuaresma, where its protagonist, as in the other three, is the reflexive and pessimistic Lieutenant Mario Conde - El Conde for the connoisseurs -. Vientos de Cuaresma is both a disconcerting thriller and a love story.

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.