The new novel—her first in six years—from the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters follows one family from China to Cuba to America in an emotionally resonant tale of immigration, assimilation, and the powerful integrity of self.

In 1857, when Chen Pan signs a contract that will take him from China “beyond the edge of the world to Cuba,” he has no idea that he will be enslaved on a sugarcane plantation . . . or that he will eventually, miraculously, escape his bonds and embark on a prosperous life in Havana’s Chinatown . . . or that he will buy a mulatto woman out of slavery and take her into his home and heart . . . or that he will end his long days in Havana, surrounded by children and grandchildren, as Cuban as he is Chinese.

In a vivid tapestry of incident and feeling, Chen Pan’s life story is interwoven with those of two of his descendants: his granddaughter, Chen Fang, born in China and raised as a boy so she could be educated, her life coming to its end in one of Mao’s hellish prisons, and Domingo, Chen Pan’s great-great-grandson, who, with his father, becomes an American citizen after Castro’s revolution, only to lose his parent to the false promises of the American dream, and himself, finally, to the madness of wartime Vietnam.

Deeply stirring, wonderfully evocative of time and place, rendered in the lyrical prose that is Cristina García’s hallmark, Monkey Hunting brilliantly illuminates a generations-long struggle toward a sense of true belonging.

From the Hardcover edition.

“In Monkey Hunting, author Cristina García does again what she is so adept at: guiding the reader through multiple generations of well-fleshed characters moving through time and place. . . . Monkey Hunting [is] a sensuous mosaic of fierce struggles to survive in new worlds.

This worthy novel deserves a broad audience.”

The Oregonian

“FIERCE AND INTOXICATING . . . VIVIDLY IMAGINED . . . MONKEY HUNTING IS A LUCKY FIND, INDEED.”

Miami Herald

“A miracle of poetic compression . . . With the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what can be left out, García has made a small masterpiece—an epic of anecdotes, a vista of brief and beautiful glimpses.”

Los Angeles Times

“Visceral, poetic, fantastic . . . Sit back. Take it in. Read Monkey Hunting for its high-octane poetry, its cocktail of color and incident, its rat-a-tat-tat of vigorous verbs, and Isabel Allende–style eroticism. . . . Glorious images born of a writer who has a gift for splicing together unexpected scenes, cultures, and similes.”

Chicago Tribune

“Monkey Hunting demonstrates that Ms. García can write just as persuasively about men as she has about women, and it signals her ambition to broaden her canvas, to explore in detail not only her characters’ inner lives but also the great public events that shape their daily existences.”

MICHIKO KAKUTANI,

The New York Times

“Such is the force of García’s sensual, warm, witty prose [that] I was happy to follow wherever she led . . . . I soon found myself deeply attached to both major and minor characters.”

The Atlantic

“GORGEOUSLY DETAILED AND ENTRANCINGLY TOLD,

EROTIC, MYSTICAL, AND WISE,

García’s bittersweet saga of a family of remarkable individuals spans a century of displacement, war, and sacrifice, and a world of forbearance and love. . . . [García] writes pristinely lyrical and enchanting prose, and creates powerfully alluring characters, delectable qualities she takes to new heights in this many-faceted tale about an extended Chinese Cuban family.”

Booklist

“García is an immensely talented writer whose work, like that of Jessica Hagedorn, Sherman Alexie, and David Foster Wallace, is renewing American fiction.”

The Nation

“[García] paints a vivid picture of her native Havana, both before and after Castro came to power. . . . Although few Chinese remain in Cuba, their legacy remains in Havana’s Chinatown. García’s eloquent novel is a fitting tribute to their lives.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“A VIVID FAMILY SAGA . . .

GARCÍA WRITES BEAUTIFULLY.”

Austin American-Statesman

“An expert sense of timing and pace . . . This slim book lodges so deeply under the skin. In describing the sensual world, García depicts her characters’ experiences so luminously that it’s easy to feel the pang of their homesickness, the oomph of their heartbreak.”

The Boston Sunday Globe

“In Monkey Hunting, author Cristina García does again what she is so adept at: guiding the reader through multiple generations of well-fleshed characters moving through time and place. . . . Monkey Hunting [is] a sensuous mosaic of fierce struggles to survive in new worlds.
This worthy novel deserves a broad audience.”
The Oregonian

“Visceral, poetic, fantastic . . . Sit back. Take it in. Read Monkey Hunting for its high-octane poetry, its cocktail of color and incident, its rat-a-tat-tat of vigorous verbs, and Isabel Allende–style eroticism. . . . Glorious images born of a writer who has a gift for splicing together unexpected scenes, cultures, and similes.”
Chicago Tribune

“At once dreamlike and historically accurate, lushly written and bristling with harsh human truths.”

L.A. Weekly

“A POWERFUL, ANCHORING STORY OF ORDINARY LOVE . . . Chen Pan [is] a Chinese wheat farmer whom we first meet in 1857 as he boards a ship in the hope of prosperity and winds up enslaved on a Cuban sugar plantation. His brazen escape from his captors and ultimate success as a Havana businessman become a story told down the generations.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“RADIANT . . . MESMERIZING . . .

A LOVING EXPLORATING OF HERITAGE . . .

García’s grasp of atmosphere is nonpareil and the physicality of her scene setting is intoxicating . . . García writes so well, she puts the reader in the room with her characters. . . . Monkey Hunting is a novel of great scope.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“García employs an exuberant prose style in which even the smallest of her torrent of details come heavily jeweled. . . . Escape, family ties, luck, the pull of the homeland—these García trademarks serve here as background and texture to another, more singular matter of the fully lived life.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“Up to now, [García’s] most formidable and affecting characters . . . have been women, extravagant creatures of ripe, even frenzied passions who bloom from the page as colorful as hibiscus blossoms and as huge as Amazons . . . and happily, Monkey Hunting swells their ranks by two.”

Miami Herald

Cristina García was born in Havana and grew up in New York City. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was nominated for a National Book Award and has been widely translated. Ms. García has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. She lives in Santa Monica with her daughter, Pilar.

From the Hardcover edition.