A Private House

By Anthony Hyde

Cuba’s dazzling sun casts the darkest shadows…

Set against the backdrop of contemporary Havana, A Private House explores the lives of two very different women whose lives become irreversibly woven together.

Lorraine, a widow in her fifties, has travelled to the Cuban capital to honour the dying wish of a close friend. Mathilde, a young French journalist, has been commissioned to write a story about Cuba in the final years of the Castro regime. She is due to interview former Black Panther, Bailey, who also happens to be an exile from the US and has been living in Havana since the 1960s. 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 Malecon. 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…

Filled with rich, atmospheric passages that bring a remarkable city to life, A Private House is a gripping novel that powerfully explores two women’s search for a sense of self whilst also tackling the themes of race and sexuality in the process.