Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
“Acevedo has written the impossible: an Odyssey for the Cuban 20th century.”—Junot Diaz
A sweeping, choral portrait of a man as seen through the eyes of those who loved him, feared him, and were betrayed by him.
Cages is the story of Felix—a zookeeper in Cuba during the time of the missile crisis, an exile in swinging sixties London, and finally a dying man in 1980s AIDS-era Miami. In this daring novel, Acevedo’s most personal and heartfelt to date, the fragments of Felix’s story are put together like pieces of a puzzle by one who knew him mostly as an absence.
Cuba, 1963. Felix risks everything for an illicit love affair with a co-worker. In a society where homosexuality is branded “counterrevolutionary,” their tenderness unfolds in the shadow of danger, treachery, and political oppression. In London, Felix and his wife Anabel navigate exile and reinvention, while an aspiring actress named Claudia finds herself drawn into their orbit, her ambitions and desires colliding with Felix’s own hunger for connection. Years later, Virgilio—Anabel’s devoted brother—recounts the disintegration of Felix’s marriage and his decision to step in and protect the family Felix abandoned. From Anabel, long silent about her complicity in the events that forced Felix’s flight from Cuba, to Rita, the daughter born out of wedlock, each vivid character gives us a different version of Felix, and the result is a dazzling mosaic of longing, deception, survival, and reconciliation.
Spanning Havana, London, and Miami over a thirty-year arc, Cages explores exile, forbidden love, fractured families, the nature of truth, and the stories we tell to make sense of the people we cannot forget.
Praise for Chantel Acevedo
“Cages is the hard, but delicately rendered realization that you can only really know the fragments of a person they present to you, and sometimes love can cause you to cling to those fragments well after they’ve ripped you apart. With heart-rending efficiency, Acevedo has gifted readers with a sweeping, historical tale that is tender and resonant, reconciliatory and liberating.”—Addie Citchens, author of Dominion
“With Cages Acevedo has written the impossible: an Odyssey for the Cuban 20th century…Love, revolution, exile, betrayal, heartbreak, sirens—it’s all here, raised to indelible heights by Acevedo’s incomparable gifts. Felix, the fractured heart of this kaleidoscopic masterpiece, is both shattered and shattering.”—Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
“Acevedo is one of the most versatile and exciting writers of her generation, with a voice that speaks not only to the American experience, but to our universal humanity.”—Julianna Baggot, author of the Pure trilogy
“Acevedo brilliantly conveys the dual nature of the stories we tell ourselves…The Distant Marvels, like love itself, is both storm and shelter at once.”—Justin Torres, National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts
“The Distant Marvels is a compelling, gorgeously written epic about Cuban women as fierce as the storms and the hardships they endure. Every scene, every detail, every utterance and intimacy feels richly, enchantingly true.”—Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban
“Acevedo hovers between poetry and prose, romance and history, nostalgia and modern life.”—Margarita Engle, author of The Surrender Tree
“This illuminating novel from Acevedo (The Distant Marvels) documents the tormented life of a gentle zookeeper in Fidel Castro’s Cuba... the author shows how the cages of the title are both literal and metaphorical, representing homophobia, heteronormative marriage, and authoritarianism. It’s a mournful and impactful story of displacement.”—Publishers Weekly