Translation Rights TQE / Adiós Hemingway

When the bones of a man murdered forty years earlier surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, ex-cop and writer Mario Conde is called in to investigate. As he unearths the truth of the night of 3rd October 1958 he is forced to come to terms with a very different side to his former literary hero.

Padura Fuentes switches between Conde’s world and that of Hemingway’s Cuba four decades earlier; in the heat and rum haze, the two eras seem slowly to merge. It is a beguiling journey into the past and into the personality of one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic and powerful writers, and the portrait that emerges is totally convincing. Adiós Hemingway is also a riveting mystery that will keep you in suspense until the very final pages.

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.