July 2023 – Armando Lucas Correa & Kimberly Garza

Book of the Month

 

THE NIGHT TRAVELER

Author: Armando Lucas Correa

Publisher: Atria Books

ISBN-10: 1501187988 / ISBN-13: 978-1501187988

 

 

SUMMARY: 

Four generations of women experience love, loss, war, and hope from the rise of Nazism to the Cuban Revolution and finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall in this sweeping novel from the bestselling author of the “timely must-read” (People) The German Girl.

Berlin, 1931: Ally Keller, a talented young poet, is alone and scared when she gives birth to a mixed-race daughter, she names Lilith. As the Nazis rise to power, Ally knows she must keep her baby in the shadows to protect her against Hitler’s deadly ideology of Aryan purity. But as she grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep Lilith hidden so Ally sets in motion a dangerous and desperate plan to send her daughter across the ocean to safety.

Havana, 1958: Now an adult, Lilith has few memories of her mother or her childhood in Germany. Besides, she’s too excited for her future with her beloved Martin, a Cuban pilot with strong ties to the Batista government. But as the flames of revolution ignite, Lilith and her newborn daughter, Nadine, find themselves at a terrifying crossroads.

Berlin, 1988: As a scientist in Berlin, Nadine is dedicated to ensuring the dignity of the remains of all those who were murdered by the Nazis. Yet she has spent her entire lifetime avoiding the truth about her own family’s history. It takes her daughter, Luna, to encourage Nadine to uncover the truth about the choices her mother and grandmother made to ensure the survival of their children. And it will fall to Luna to come to terms with a shocking betrayal that changes everything she thought she knew about her family’s past.

Separated by time but united by sacrifice, four women – Ally, Lilith, Nadine and Luna – embark on journeys of self-discovery and find themselves to be living testaments to the power of motherly love.

 

About the Author:

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA is a Cuban writer and journalist.

Author of three historical novels: The German Girl (2016, Atria Books/Simon & Schuster), an international bestseller that has been translated into 16 languages, published in 30 countries and sold more than one million copies; The Daughter’s Tale (2019, Atria) and The Night Travelers(2023, Atria).

His memoir, In Search of Emma: How We Created Our Family, about fatherhood, surrogacy, and IVF was published in Spanish by Rayo/HarperCollins in 2009 and in English by HarperOne/HarperCollins in 2021.

He is hard at work on a fourth novel, The Science in Her Eyes, a psychological thriller about a motion-blind young woman entangled in act of violence connected to a new tenant in her New York apartment building. He is under contract for two more books with Simon & Schuster.  His essays have appeared in Time Magazine,People Weekly, People en Español, The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, Jewish Book Council PB Daily, Oprah Daily and El Estornudo.

Armando began his career as an editor and reviewer at Tablas, a national theater and dance magazine in Havana, before joining the reporting staff of El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish edition of The Miami Herald, in 1991. Armando is a graduate of the University of Arts in Cuba (Instituto Superior de Arte) and has a graduate degree in journalism from the University of Havana.

In 2022, Correa received the Cintas Foundation Creative Writing Fellowship for The Night Travelers. In 2017, at the International Latino Book Awards, La niña alemana won the First Place (Best Fiction Book in Spanish)  and The German Girl, Second Place (Best Fiction Book Translated from Spanish to English). He is the recipient of various outstanding achievement awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications and the Society of Professional Journalists. He was the Hispanic Public Relations Association’s Journalist of the Year in 2017 and received the AT&T Humanity of Connection Award in 2018.

Armando lives in New York City with his husband and three children.

 

https://www.armandolucascorrea.com/the-night-travelers-1.html

https://www.armandolucascorrea.com/about-us.html

 

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Conversations With Book

 

THE LAST KARANKAWAS

Author: Kimberly Garza

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.

ISBN: 1250819857 / ISBN-13: 978-1250819857

 


SUMMARY:

A blazing and kaleidoscopic debut about a tight-knit community of Mexican and Filipino American families on the Texas coast from a voice you won’t soon forget.

Welcome to Galveston, Texas. Population 50,241.

Carly Castillo has only ever known Galveston. Her grandmother Magdalena claims that they descend from the Karankawas, an extinct indigenous Texan tribe, thereby tethering them to the land. Meanwhile, her boyfriend and all-star shortstop turned seaman, Jess, treasures the salty, familiar air. He’s gotten chances to leave for bigger cities, but he didn’t take them then and he sure as hell won’t now. When word spreads of a storm gathering strength offshore known as Hurricane Ike, each Galveston resident must make a difficult decision: board up the windows and hunker down or flee inland and abandon their hard-won homes.

Moving through the extraordinary lives of these characters and the many individuals who circle them, The Last Karankawas weaves together a multitude of voices to present a lyrical, emotionally charged portrait of everyday survival. The result is an unforgettable exploration of familial inheritance, human resilience, and the histories we assign to ourselves.

 

About the Author:

Kimberly Garza (she/her) is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, Creative Nonfiction, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She holds degrees in English, Spanish, and creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas, where she earned a PhD in 2019.

A native Texan—born in Galveston, raised in Uvalde—she is the daughter of a Filipina immigrant mother and a Mexican-American father from the Rio Grande Valley. She lives in San Antonio, where she is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The Last Karankawas is her first novel.