Loving Che - Tapa dura

In the aftermath of Castro's revolution, a man flees Cuba with his daughter's baby, and finds, pinned on its clothes, three lines of a Pablo Neruda love poem. Decades later, that baby returns to Havana as a young woman; armed with only this snatch of verse, she searches in vain for the mother who abandoned her. On her return to America she receives a package - a collection of tattered photographs of Che Guevara, and a letter, apparently from her mother, which documents a passionate affair with the hero of the revolution. Now, the daughter must set out for Cuba once more, to find out whether this story is a fantasy, bred out of the savage and surreal drama of Cuba's history. Ana Menendez's writing has the heady poetry of Isabelle Allende, and the clever narrative idea is handled with intelligence.

Ana Menendez is the daughter of Cuban exiles who fled to Los Angeles in the 1960s before settling in Miami in the 1980s. Loving Che is her first novel and has been translated into eleven languages. Her story collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd has also been translated into eleven languages. She lives in Miami Beach.