Havana Year Zero – Karla Suarez
Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez, translated by Christina MacSweeney / ISBN 9781913867003 / 256-page paperback with flaps from Charco Press (Edinburgh)
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It was as if we’d reached the minimum critical point of a mathematical curve. Imagine a parabola. Zero point down, at the bottom of an abyss. That’s how low we sank.
The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc.For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more. What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.
Karla Suárez was born in Havana in 1969. In 2007 she was selected by Hay Festival to be part of the Bogotá 39 and in 2019, she received the Premio Iberoamericano Julio Cortázar. Havana Year Zero (originally published in 2011) is her third novel.
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