A Handbook to Luck - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Cristina García (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the late 60s, three teenagers from around the globe are making their way in the world: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon's daughter in Tehran. We follow them through the years, surviving war, disillusionment, and love, as their lives and paths intersect. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement through time, and the psychological shifts between childhood and adulthood, A Handbook to Luck is a beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel by beloved storyteller Cristina García.

Review Quotes

"Graceful. . . . Beautiful. . . . Provocative."--USA Today "Garcia writes with humor, tenderness and an intuitive sense of how ordinary people weather fortune's turns. If you long for a 'handbook' that reveals how ordinary people become extraordinary, you are in luck."--New York Daily News "A magically lyrical meditation on life and human dreams . . . García [is] a poet of imagery and metaphor." --Elle"Pitch-perfect . . .. García is still drawn to describe the richness and variety of the immigrant experience. . . . [But] she also fixes her attention on the fundamentally human desire to make sense of the world, to impose order on the chaos of nature and to rationalize one's mysterious place within it." --Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Cristina Garcia was born in Havana and grew up in New York City. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was nominated for a National Book Award and had been widely translated. Ms. Garcia has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. She lives in Santa Monica with her daughter, Pilar.