Follows the plight of Wormold, a former vacuum cleaner salesman, who becomes a slave to the expensive whims of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Milly, and takes on a job for MI6 as Secret Agent 5920015 to pay for them.

Told with wry wit and keen insight, this entertaining and richly satisfying story about a fictionalized Fidel Castro-like octogenarian Cuban exile obsessed with seeking revenge against the dictator--from the National Book Award finalist and author of "Dreaming in Cuban."

Le Monde Claudio's apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion...

"A novel based on the dazzling story of one of Hollywood's most celebrated Hispanic actresses and her daughter's search for closure. Cuba, 1936: When Estelita Rodriguez sings in a hazy Havana nightclub for the very first time, she is nine years old. From then on, that spotlight of adoration--from Havana to New York's Copacabana and then Hollywood--becomes the one true accomplishment no one can take from her. Not the 1933 Cuban Revolution that drove...