Liliana Bell and the American Fable

From Havana to Miami to Washington, a darkly exuberant novel of ambition and mythmaking—a sweeping portrait of power, sacrifice, and the stories that shape nations and the families who survive them

Seventeen and pregnant, Cuban immigrant Liliana Bell delivers a mysterious package to el señor Presidente—the disgraced former U.S. leader and self-styled savior of the Western Hemisphere. When her water breaks in his Miami Beach suite, an unlikely covenant is forged. Naming her newborn Victoria Ricarda in his honor, Liliana leaves her abusive husband for Bobo Delgado, a banking magnate and el señor Presidente’s closest confidant—unaware of the grand, delusional plans the two men share to liberate Cuba and redeem their legacies.

In the ensuing decades, Liliana ascends through the corridors of American politics, becoming many things—immigrant, survivor, senator, spy—until the myths that made her threaten to consume her family. Her grandson preaches revolution from the wilderness, her daughter vanishes into the hills, and her namesake rises in Washington, torn between loyalty and escape.

Roiling through the tumult of half a century of American political history with its island neighbor, the novel closes on the days after the insurrection at the Capitol, as the boogeymen of the past crown this tale of cabals, compromises, and conspiracies that make both countries and their powerbrokers seem more similar than either would deign to admit.