Sacrificio by Ernesto Mestre-Reed

Cuba, 1998: Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a cafe. He is soon drawn into a web of ever-shifting entanglements with his boss's son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group 'Los Injected Ones,' which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II's upcoming visit.

When Renato goes missing, Rafa's search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city's detritus by Los Injected Ones.

A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humour of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.

Paperback / 456 pages