A Hundred Fires in Cuba

In the spring of 1956, a young American photographer falls in love with a Cuban line cook in New York. They have a ten-week affair which ends when Immigration arrests and deports him, and by then Clare Miller is pregnant.
Few Americans know the name Camilo Cienfuegos. All Cubans do. He was the most charismatic of Castro's rebel commanders. But Clare, who never hears from him after he's deported, believes he has died in Fidel's invasion of the island. She marries a wealthy Cuban businessman and moves to Havana with her two-year-old daughter, only to discover that her first love is not only still alive, he's now head of the Cuban Army. Clare knows that Camilo likes to dance and drink. He likes women, and too many women like him. Though his courage is legendary, when he comes to visit at night he's afraid of his daughter's moods. He feeds her, he reads to her, he changes her diapers, but for him an all-night march would be easier. Clare worries that he'll never make a good parent, but she cannot resist him.

Author: John Thorndike
Publisher: John Thorndike
Published: 08/15/2018
Pages: 332
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.74d
ISBN: 9780997264470

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2018 pg. 198
Foreword 06/26/2018

About the Author
Thorndike, John: - John Thorndike grew up in New England, graduated from Harvard, took an MA from Columbia, then lit out for Latin America. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and two, with his wife and child, on a backcountry farm in Chile. Eventually he settled with his son in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years his day job was farming. Then it was construction. His first two books were novels, followed by a memoir, Another Way Home, about his wife's schizophrenia and his life as a single parent. A second memoir, The Last of His Mind, describes his father's year-long descent into Alzheimer's. A Hundred Fires in Cuba is his latest novel, and he's at work on the next one, a half-fictional evocation of his mother's life.

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