Posesas de La Habana
(Haunted Ladies of Havana)

By Teresa Dovalpage

On a night in the year 2000, during one of Havana's enforced blackouts, four women in a Cuban family confront their lives and one another as tragedy lurks outside their walls.

When different generations live under one roof, disputes will surely break out. When they are mothers and daughters ranging in age from eleven to ninety, the estrogen building up in a two-bedroom apartment can reach dramatic proportions. The characters in this Spanish-language novel, embroiled in endless economic problems and political asphyxia, live not merely at the edge but in the middle of a constant nervous breakdown. Can these women find hope on an island where the sea appears as the only route to salvation?

"An original, thrilling novel . . . written in a spare and agile style, with a clever, seamless structure ... an obligatory passage for those who want to know, close up, the gloomy interiors of life in present-day Cuba. . . . Teresa Dovalpage is a new literary voice that's here to stay."
—El Nuevo Herald (Miami)

"Posesas de La Habana could well be a tropicalization of García Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, but in this case the enclosure is the island, and Fate is the dictatorship. . . . Altogether, this is a terrifying novel that one is impelled to read."
—Diario Las Américas (Miami)

"The novel’s strength lies in Dovalpage’s ability to construct the complex personal background of these characters, touching on their sexual histories and the generational restrictions behind their confrontations with one another. The book is easy to read despite some Cuban regionalisms . . . " —Críticas

"A tragic and beautiful work. . . . From the start, the story itself is the principal protagonist, and the reader becomes the character who must discover it."
—El Viento de Chicago

Teresa Dovalpage, born in Havana in 1966, emigrated to the United States in 1996. Currently a resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico, she is the author of A Girl Like Che Guevara (Soho Press, 2004), which Carlos Eire, prize-winning Cuban-American author calls “part Orwell’s Animal Farm, part Golding’s Lord of the Flies.”

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Categories	Novel
ISBN	0-9714366-7-3
Format	Paperback, 6 x 9, 208 pages
Price	$20.00
Pub Date	2004
Publisher	Pureplay Press Publisher Web site: www.pureplaypress.com

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