Revolution Sunday

Wendy Guerra

Translated by Achy Obejas

A novel about glamour, surveillance, and corruption in contemporary Cuba, from an internationally bestselling author — who has never before been translated into English

Cleo, scion of a once-prominent Cuban family and a promising young writer in her own right, travels to Spain to collect a prestigious award. There, Cuban expats view her with suspicion — assuming she’s an informant for the Castro regime. To Cleo’s surprise, that suspicion follows her home to Cuba, where she finds herself under constant surveillance by the government. When she meets and falls in love with a Hollywood filmmaker, she discovers her family is not who she thought they were… and neither is the filmmaker.

WENDY GUERRA, born in Havana in 1970, is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and was selected for Bogotá 39, the prestigious group of writers from the Hay Bogotá project. In 2015 and 2016, she was a visiting professor at Princeton and UCLA.

From an early age, she found success as a poet, publishing her first volume of poetry aged 17 whilst attending the University of Havana. She later pursued studies in filmmaking and hosted a number of TV shows about culture and television on the national Cuban broadcaster. She began to circulate and publish her texts abroad, to great critical acclaim. As a result of this success, she has been considered with suspicion by Cuban intelligence services and has remained largely unpublished in her native country. Drawing inspiration from her diaries and also from the visual arts, her texts often combine filmic, personal, and poetic elements.

ACHY OBEJAS is an award-winning translator and author of the critically acclaimed novels Ruins and Days of Awe. She is director of the MFA in Translation program at Mills College in Oakland, CA.

“Wendy Guerra is a rare bird in a country where everyone is seeking conclusive adjectives and extreme descriptions. Actress, writer, blogger and a Havanan down to her core, she always stands out.” —Yoani Sánchez, Huffington Post

“Havana’s literary darling.” —La Habana

“[A] classic story about coming of age in a broken down revolutionary culture in the tropics, the book that she calls her luxury, my medicine, what keeps me standing, a book that delivers real news from Cuba in a lyrical way.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR, on Everyone Leaves