Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes - Softcover

'Bracing... Kennedy's journalistic training is manifest in a clear, sure voice that swiftly guides the reader through a refreshingly old-school narrative. Thick with backroom deal making and sharp commentary on corruption, Kennedy's novel describes a world he clearly knows, and through plenty of action, careful historical detail, and larger-than-life characters, he brilliantly brings it to life' - Publisher's Weekly, starred review

'Pulitzer-winning Kennedy has seldom taken his fiction beyond his native city of Albany, New York. So it comes as a surprise to find him locating much of this novel's action in revolutionary Cuba, where his long-time protagonist Daniel Quinn arrives with hopes of emulating Ernest Hemingway. But it is Kennedy's rendering of Albany's grimy streets, where Quinn returns to make his way as a muckraking journalist, that continues to make his fiction essential reading' - Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times 30/9

'Kennedy's writing is effulgent and desperately comic, dizzying in its depths of sorrow'

'Kennedy's eighth Albany novel taxes its reader but provides an evocative, jazz-infused ride through revolutionary Cuba and Sixties Albany, complete with Hemingway, gun-running girlfriends and race riots' - Sunday Telegraph --Jonathan Franzen

When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, in 1957, he has no idea that his own affinity for simple, declarative sentences will change his life radically overnight. So begins William Kennedy's latest novel -- a tale of revolutionary intrigue, heroic journalism, crooked politicians, drug-running gangsters, Albany race riots, and the improbable rise of Fidel Castro. Quinn's epic journey carries him through the nightclubs and jungles of Cuba and into the newsrooms and racially charged streets of Albany on the day Robert Kennedy is fatally shot in 1968. The odyssey brings Quinn, and his exotic but unpredictable wife Renata, a debutante revolutionary, face to face with the darkest facets of human nature and illuminates the power of love in the presence of death.