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Knopf
April 2007
On Sale: April 10, 2007
272 pages
ISBN: 030726436X
EAN: 9780307264367
Hardcover
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Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Monkey Hunting (“A miracle of
poetic compression . . . An epic of anecdotes, a vista of
brief and beautiful glimpses” —Los Angeles Times Book
Review), a lyrical, haunting, deeply moving new novel. Late 1960s. We meet three children: Enrique Florit, from
Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant
magician father . . . Marta Claros, getting by in the slums
of San Salvador, forced to leave school to help support her
family, her beloved older brother having already left home .
. . Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon’s daughter in
Tehran, her mother concerned only with appearances, her
father an often foolishly vocal opponent of the Shah. As we follow them across the next twenty years—the narrative
moving among their lives—we see Enrique, a math whiz from a
young age, sacrificing his dream of attending MIT to filial
duty, and the dream of passionate love to the exigencies of
reality . . . Marta, fleeing war in El Salvador, making her
way illegally into the United States and finding wholly
unexpected possibilities . . . Leila, allowing the
expectations of her mother to pull her into an arranged
marriage and the constricted life of women in
postrevolutionary Iran. We see chance draw Leila and Marta
into Enrique’s life—Leila and Enrique loving and losing each
other, Marta the means to renewed hope for Enrique—and,
throughout, “good luck or bad tilting life one way or
another” for all of them. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful
movement through time and the psychological shifts between
childhood and adulthood, and its subtle revelation of the
essential hopes and doubts of ordinary people whose lives
are made extraordinary by circumstance both tragic and
joyful, A Handbook to Luck is Cristina García’s most
beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel yet.
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