Additional information
by Karla Suárez (Author), Christina Macsweeney (Translator)
Sex, lies, and scientific history collide in 1993 Havana.
It was as if we'd reached the minimum critical point of a mathematical curve. Imagine a parabola. Zero point down, at the bottom of an abyss. That's how low we sank.
The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc.For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more. What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.
Author Biography
Karla Suárez Karla Suárez was born in Havana in 1969. Since her childhood, she has been passionate about mathematics, writing stories, and music. She studied classical guitar and has a degree in electronic engineering, a profession she continues to develop. Suárez is the author of five collections of short stories and four novels. Her novels received many awards, such as the Lengua de Trapo Prize for her 1999 debut novel Silencios (Silences ); and the Prix Carbet of the Caribbean and Tout-Monde and the Insular Book Prize, both in France, in 2012. Many of her stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines published in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Several of her stories have been adapted for television and theatre. Suárez has received several creative grants, including the one awarded by the National Book Center of France (CNL). In 2007, she was selected by the Hay Festival and Bogota World Book Capital, as one of 39 representative young writers of Latin America. She lives in Lisbon, where she coordinates the Reading Club of the Cervantes Institute and works as a writing teacher at the Writers' School in Madrid.
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator, working mainly in the areas of Latin American fiction, essays, poetry, and hybrid texts. She has translated works by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez and Elvira Navarro. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published shorter translations, articles, interviews and collaborations on a wide variety of platforms. Her most recent translations are Jazmina Barrera's Cross-Stitch (shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Institute Translation Prize) and Clyo Mendoza's Fury. In 2024, she was granted a Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci's The Company.
