Agua por todas partes: Vivir y escribir en Cuba [Water Everywhere: To Live and to Write in Cuba] by bestselling Cuban author Leonardo Padura will be on the shelves in a little over a week. The novel is at once a memoir and an exploration of his favorite genre, the novel.

Description: Leonardo Padura’s books are made of history, of literature, of Cuban cigar smoke, and of baseball, of which Havana’s narrator is so fond. This new work by Padura is a celebration and a tribute to the novel genre, to which he feels so indebted; through its pages, he deals with questions around this invention, which has been dealing with human issues for four centuries and continues being a tool for the transformation and reflection of society. However, Padura does not avoid the personal arena and he shows us the most intimate part of his work, the china shop, the worktable where characters and plots come to life and later become part of his celebrated novels. It contains a brilliant account of how narrative material becomes what begins as a faint light in the writer’s mind. Told in the words of the author: “Between an abstract obsession, almost philosophical, and the complicated process of writing a novel, there is a long stretch, full of obstacles and challenges.” Padura gently takes the reader’s hand, and is responsible for illuminating that complicated path to lead us to the door of the edifice of the novel.

[Translated by Ivette Romero. For original source (in Spanish), see https://www.planetadelibros.com/libro-agua-por-todas-partes/289393]