Telex from Cuba: A Novel - Softcover

"Multilayered and absorbing... Studded with illuminating images....Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume." -- Susann Cokal, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"With its sharp detail and precisely drawn characters, Telex from Cuba offers a compelling look at a paradise corrupted." --People

"A riveting drama. Given the recent Cuba headlines, Kushner's tale, passionately told and intensively researched, couldn't have come at a more opportune time." --Publishers Weekly

"Castro's coup serves as a riveting backdrop...gorgeously written." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Kushner has written a gripping tale of what it was like to live through a momentous time. It is a powerful, haunting look at the human side of revolution." --Booklist

"A pure treat from the cover to the very last page. It's the kind of thing you should stock up on to give sick friends as presents; they'll forget their arthritis and pneumonia, I promise, once they walk into a land that's gone now, but not yet quite forgotten: Cuba in the last few years before Fidel Castro took over.... 'Lost' and 'Gone, ' as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the early pages of "The Last Tycoon," lost and gone. A world we'll never see again, any part of it. Rachel Kushner uses her considerable powers to bring it back for us, one last time."--Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World

"[A] lush, meticulous, cinematic debut novel.... Kushner's vivid renderings of country clubs and cane shacks are due in no small part to her access to primary sources."--Megan Deem, Elle

"Kushner brings both a reporter's meticulous research and a novelist's flair for the fantastical to her examination of Cuba before the revolution....she illuminates both the natural beauty and savage inequities of an island constantly on the cusp of lawlessness....a snapshot from a long-gone era."--Entertainment Weekly

"Kushner fills the novel with enough vivid details to make readers feel as if they are on the island at the zenith of American prosperity.... Kushner's evocation of the Americans' decline is fresh and compelling. She takes us to a place and time we've seldom visited before."--David Abrams, San Francisco Chronicle

"The bygone American world in 1950s Cuba is brought vibrantly alive ... ambitious.... Kushner is an evocative writer with a cinematic eye for telling detail."--John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution—a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.
Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom—three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child’s dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them—the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.

In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazière, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of “yanqui” revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.

At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.