Havana, 1957.
A tale of unforgettable beauty\' Los Angeles Times on The Messenger \'A dazzling, original fugue on love and extinction\' New Yorker on The Palm of Darkness. . .
Praise for Mayra Montero\'s previous novels: \'A literary tour de force .
Based on the true history of a bewitching city and its denizens, `Almendra\' is the latest triumph from one of Latin America\'s most impassioned and intoxicating voices.
In Dancing to `Almendra\', Mayra Montero has created an ardent and thrilling tale of innocence lost, of Havana\'s secret world that is `the basis for the clamor of the city\', and of the end of a violent era of fantastic characters and extravagant crimes.
Told by Yolanda, a beautiful ex-circus performer now working for the famed Sans Souci cabaret, it interleaves through Joaquin\'s underworld investigations, eventually revealing a family secret deeper even than Havana\'s brilliantly evoked enigmas.
The love story is another mystery.
In exchange for a promise to introduce the keeper to his idol, the film star George Raft, now the host of the Capri casino, Joaquin gets information that ensnares him in an ever-thickening plot of murder, mobsters, and, finally, love.
Assigned to cover the zoo story, Joaquin Porrata, a young Cuban journalist, finds himself embroiled in the mysterious connections between the hippo\'s death and the mobster\'s when a secretive zookeeper whispers to him that he `knows too much\'.
On the same day that the Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia is assassinated in a barber\'s chair in New York, a hippopotamus escapes from the zoo and is shot and killed by its pursuers.
Havana, 1957
