Havana Year Zero

Author: Suarez, Karla

Cuba

Published on 23 February 2021 by Charco Press in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 256 pages, Not illustrated
135 x 280 x 23 | 324g

Sex, lies, and scientific history collide in 1993 Havana.

It was as if we’d reached the minimum critical point of a mathematical curve. Imagine a parabola. Zero point down, at the bottom of an abyss. That’s how low we sank.

The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc.For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more. What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.