Cuba’s dazzling sun casts the darkest shadows...

A Private House, Anthony Hyde’s brilliant new novel, takes us into the lives of two very different women and to one of the most remarkable cities in the world—Havana, in the twilight of the Castro regime. Lorraine has come there to honour the dying wish of an old friend. Mathilde, a French journalist, is writing about the end of the revolution as seen through the eyes of Bailey, a Black Panther and plane hijacker, an exile from the States and from the sixties.

The two women don’t have much in common—or so it seems.

But in a single week, they find their lives running parallel and then twisting together as the action takes them from the narrow passages of the Old City, dark with poverty and the mysteries of santeria, into the leafy streets of Vedado and the sea breezes along the Malecón. Caught up in this decaying world, the women step into history but also into themselves, making private journeys—emotional, spiritual, sexual—and what they discover isn’t necessarily what they expect to find.

A remarkable departure from Anthony Hyde’s previous work, A Private House creates a Havana as haunting as Graham Greene’s, rich with the colour of an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time, but also filled with the mystery and passion of ordinary lives.