★普立茲小說獎得主Junot Diaz（《你就這樣失去了她》《貧民窟宅男的世界末日》）盛讚作家“gloriously gifted and alarmingly intelligent”
★震撼文壇首作小說《Vida》：2011年獨立出版商獎文學小說金獎、紐約時報年度注目好書、NPR年度最佳首作、筆會/海明威獎決選作、美國紐約公共圖書館雄獅文學獎決選作

An astonishing novel set in Cuba, Colombia, and the Florida Keys, centered on a young Latina woman whose brother serves a prison sentence on Death Row.

Reina Castillo is the alluring young woman whose beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community, throwing a baby off a bridge—a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. With her brother's death, though devastated and in mourning, Reina is finally released from her prison vigil. Seeking anonymity, she moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys where she meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting with hope the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto’s love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her as well as its role in her family's troubled history, and in their companionship, begins to find freedom from the burden of guilt she carries for her brother’s crime.

Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.

 

Patricia Engel is the author of Vida and the acclaimed novel It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, A Public Space, Harvard Review, and Guernica. She received numerous awards including a 2014 fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts.