Summary

In the summer of 1952, eight-year-old Everly Lederer’s family was about to leave their home in Tennessee for Cuba. Everly found the island on a map, below the Tropic of Cancer. She imagined a sea of Sargasso, pirates, and a red draped room for her to play Chopin in a minor key.

It was January 1958. Thirteen-year-old K.C. Stites, now narrating in the first-person from a point in the distant future, woke up to a red sky. As his Jamaican nanny Annie made him breakfast, his father Malcolm Stites rushed out the door in a panic. As he drove off in the company Buick, K.C. realized it was the first time he had seen his father drive his own car. As the manager of United Fruit Company’s Cuba division, he always had a driver. They grew sugarcane, a valuable crop...