Hemingway's Island

Book excerpt: It was Cuba in the early 1960's as the USA and USSR brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Renowned author Ernest Hemingway was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There he was, America's most famous writer, living in the heart of the revolution in Communist Cuba. There he was, author of For Whom the Bells Tolls, the novel Fidel Castro claimed to have used as a model for his guerilla insurgency. Hemingway's Island is a rich adventure that exposes readers to two distinct narrators of Hemingway's last, wild days in Cuba: Mary, Hemingway's fourth wife, describing his last week in their Cuban home, the Finca Vigia, and Alf O'Malley, a Canadian graduate student in 2010 Havana with his pregnant girlfriend. Alf is a hyperactive, awkward hero who falls into dangerous misadventures as he searches for Mary's long-lost manuscript, written for Life Magazine but never published.