Skip to Main Content

Telex from Cuba

A Novel

Read by Lloyd James
LIST PRICE $23.99

About The Book

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

The debut novel by New York Times bestselling author Rachel Kushner, called “shimmering” (The New Yorker), “multilayered and absorbing” (The New York Times Book Review), and “gorgeously written” (Kirkus Reviews).

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.

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

About The Author

Chloe Aftel

Rachel Kushner is the author of three acclaimed novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K and The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

About The Reader

Product Details

  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (April 2, 2019)
  • Runtime: 12 hours and 55 minutes
  • ISBN13: 9781508294368

Browse Related Books

Resources and Downloads

Freshman Reading:

Kalamazoo College (2009/2010)

High Resolution Images

More books from this author: Rachel Kushner

More books from this reader: Lloyd James