Translation Rights TQE / The Mist of Yesterday

Havana, summer of 2003.  Fourteen years have gone by since Lieutenant Mario Conde, disenchanted, leaves the police force.  Many changes have taken place during those years in Cuba, but also in the life of Mario Conde.  His interest in literature and the need to make a living have made him dedicate himself to the market of second-hand books.  The discovery of a very valuable library situates him on the border of a very good business deal, good enough to solve his economic problems.  In one of the books, however, he finds a magazine page where Violeta del Río, a singer of boleros from the 1950s announces her retirement at the peak of her career.  He becomes attracted by her beauty, by the mystery of her retirement, and by the silence thereafter.  Mario Conde – now older and with more scars on his skin and in his heart – begins an investigation without being able to imagine that, by following the trace of Violeta del Río, he will awaken a turbulent past that has been hidden from view, just like the magnificent library, for over forty years. 

Considered one of the best representatives of current Cuban literature, Leonardo Padura brings back detective Mario Conde with La neblina del ayer and creates a vivid literary chronicle of everyday life in his Caribbean island.  It is a portrait of the difficulties in Cuba today, but it is also a trip to the nocturnal Havana of the 1950s, to its music, to the world of books on the island, and it is also, in a sense, a descent to the underworld of the world of Havana today, which Conde must enter to follow the footsteps of the enigmatic singer Violeta del Río.

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.