Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

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A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born

In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.

From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals—personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others—that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots.

Gabriela Garcia is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in fiction from Purdue and lives in the Bay Area. Of Women and Salt is her first novel.

Maite Morales, PhD, is the Senior Program Coordinator of CasaCuba at Florida International University. She is responsible for creating and executing public and educational programs that support CasaCuba’s vision and mission. Dr. Morales’s scholarly interests and areas of expertise include modern Cuban history, material culture, memory, gender, and consumption. Her work has received support from the Tinker Foundation, the Morris and Anita Broad Fellowship, the Eliana Rivero Research Scholarship at the Cuban Research Institute (FIU), and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida.

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Of Women and Salt: An Evening with Gabriela Garcia and Maite Morales