Sacrificio
Ernesto Mestre-Reed
ISBN: 9781641293648
Published: September 2022
Pricing
Hardcover $27.00
eBook $14.99
Ernesto Mestre-Reed
Description
Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government.
Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon...
Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government.
Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon drawn into a web of bizarre, ever-shifting entanglements with his boss’s son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group “Los Injected Ones,” which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit.
When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones.
A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.
Media
“[Sacrificio] imagines an extreme counterrevolutionary movement during desperate times . . . To Rafael’s bildungsroman amid half-cocked terrorists and a love triangle with their leaders, add a spy-novel parody, a kaleidoscopic Christ narrative, a battery of literary references and a portrait of Cuban life under socialism. ”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A sprawling historical novel that manages to be intimate in its humanity, Sacrificio drew me in and held me in its grip until the very last page . . . Funny and daring, with a plot that will keep readers guessing until the very end, this is the perfect read for anyone looking for fiction that is epic and socially conscious. Its length may seem daunting at first, but trust me, you won’t be able to put it down. ”