Everyone Leaves: A Novel
About this audiobook
“A classic story . . . delivers real news from Cuba in a lyrical way.”–NPR
Available for a new generation, Wendy Guerra’s intoxicating and heartrending classic—a portrait of economically depressed post-revolutionary Cuba in the late 1970s, written as the diary of a young girl left behind by her parents and the state, who becomes caught in an acrimonious custody battle.
It is 1978, and Nieve finds herself caught between the tides of her parents' turbulent relationship and a country in turmoil. To try to control her situation, she begins to record the intimate and harsh details of her life in her diary. Becoming her sole means of expression, the diary is her only constant and her only friend. From being torn from her mother, her mother’s free-spirited and loving boyfriend, and her childhood city of Cienfuegos, to living with her abusive father, an alcoholic theater actor, to her forced induction as a Cuban “revolutionary Pioneer,” Nieve records in honest detail a life in which she is powerless as she loses the people and freedom she loves.
Mirroring the author's own experiences between the ages of eight and twenty, Everyone Leaves paints a vivid portrait of family life and social and political unrest in Castro's Cuba while exploring how the patriarchal and conformist notions of the Revolution betrayed the nation's women.
Translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas
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About the author
Wendy Guerra is a contributor for CNN en Español and has been published by various magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and the Spanish dailies El País and El Mundo. Her first collection of poetry, Platea a oscuras, earned a prize from the University of Havana when she was just seventeen. In 2006, she won the Bruguera Prize for Everyone Leaves. Although her novels have been translated into several languages, only one of them has been published in Cuba. She currently resides in south Florida.
