Keeper of My Kin

Named a Best Book of Summer by TIME and Oprah Daily * A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2026

“Stirring … Ferrer’s narrative offers a human warmth in the form of jokes and jolts of emotion couched in rich historical context … She approaches the mountains of journals, letters and documents left behind by her parents with the same rigor she applies to files in Cuba’s national archives.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Intimate … Ferrer is the ideal keeper of her kin’s stories.” —The Atlantic

“[A] heartfelt memoir of love and separation … With profound empathy, Ferrer illuminates the loving bonds between her parents and their children and her complex relationship with the island country that became the center of her scholarship and her identity.” —Oprah Daily, Best Books of Summer 2026

“Timely … as unsparing as it is tender.” —Los Angeles Times

“[An] intimate memoir… . Caught between two opposing cultures, drawing on a cache of letters, documents, and remembrances, Ferrer meticulously recounts the travails of one migrant family and a punitive legal system that dogged them, skewering ideals of equity and fairness.” —TIME, The Best New Books to Read This Summer

“A triumph.” —PBS News Hour
“Ada Ferrer’s Keeper of My Kin is a brilliant testament to the power of storytelling. A devastatingly human portrayal of the effects of migration, family secrets, and the history that binds and moves us, this book is a must-read for anyone who has ever loved. With enormous tenderness and an unflinching pursuit of truth, Ferrer writes her family into history, into memoir, into public record, into sunlight, where they—where we all—have always deserved to be.” —Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito

“[A] beautiful book.” —NPR, “All Things Considered”
“Powerful and eloquent, Keeper of My Kin explores love of family and love of place—and, for those who are forced to flee, what is left behind and what stays with them forever.” —Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle
“[Ferrer] braids a clear-eyed account of recent Cuban history with an empathetic catalog of its effects on her family. It’s a memorable and heartrending achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Magnificent … remarkable … Keeper of My Kin is full and resonant and simply superb.” —Bookpage (starred review)

“A poignant tribute to the bonds of familial love across history, geography, and political and personal challenges.” —Shelf Awareness
“A gripping family memoir, Keeper of My Kin explores fraught relationships and secret pasts against the backdrop of big history. Here, Ada Ferrer, the ‘historian daughter’ and descendant of an enslaved Black maternal ancestor, tells the truths of her kin with an aching tenderness, revealing the traumas that come with the package of racism, war, revolution, and migration. In an intimate story lovingly told, memory, history, and emotional honesty combine in a beautiful act of retrieval.” —Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
“Ada Ferrer’s remarkable Keeper of My Kin is one of those memoirs you don’t just read, but one that you feel in your bones. It’s both a fearless excavation of the past and a bold, compassionate attempt to understand the difficult choices embedded, sometimes buried, within every immigration story. I loved this book.” —Daniel Alarcón, executive producer of Radio Ambulante and author of The King Is Always Above His People
“Love is everywhere in this book: the deep romantic bond between her parents, the author’s intense attachment to both of them and to other relatives, and to the troubled island country she lived in for only ten months, yet became the center of her scholarship, her thinking, and her identity. As heartbreaking as this story often is, it is equally heartwarming, filled with love of all kinds.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Keeper of My Kin is an engrossing tale of what it takes to make and keep a family across generations, even in the face of political turmoil and impossible choices. Ada Ferrer is a deeply moving truth-teller who, in recovering the lives of her kin, rediscovers herself. On her bold and beautiful pages, we learn that migration has never been a story of politics and power alone. At its core, it is a saga about family love. A new window onto our own moment, this book is a gift to a nation striving to better understand the stakes of every stop, detention, and expulsion carried out today. It is a balm and brave call to conscience.” —Martha S. Jones, author of The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir
“The Ferrer family will forever stay with you for theirs is the story of all Cubans in the last seven decades. If you read this tender and brilliant book as I did—drying tears and holding my breath—it’ll be yours to cherish as well. A triumphant memoir of love and loss.” —Mirta Ojito, author of Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and the USA Today bestselling novel Deeper than the Ocean

Ada Ferrer is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. From 1995 to 2024, she taught at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of Cuba: An American History, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history, and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Her earlier books, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution won multiple prizes, among them the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, three prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history. Ferrer has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Social Science Research Council, among many others. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, Ferrer has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.

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