The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba

Teeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Álvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the crónica form—a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic techniques—to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement.

Unique, edgy, and stylishly written, The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring athletes in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, and dealers in the black market, as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night. It is a major work of reportage by one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.