Mrs Gargantua

Winner of the 2020 Michael Jacobs Prize; shortlisted for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award

‘Mrs Gargantua is a treasure chest full of rare and exquisitely rendered stories about the remarkable characters whose lives and actions became interwoven with Cuba’s history. Columbus, Cortés, Churchill and Castro; all are here, along with many more, including a woman who loved gorillas, Napoleon’s deathbed doctor, and the guardian of a Soviet nuclear missile silo. As our guide, Tennant is an amiable, erudite writer who shares sides to Cuba few of us have seen before, underpinned by his love for that most extraordinary of Caribbean islands. ¡Viva Cuba!’

Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

‘Mrs Gargantua is one of the most original, most insightful books about the wonderfully complex island of Cuba. I could not put it down.’

Alberto Manguel, Former Director of the National Library of Argentina

‘JS Tennant accomplishes a rare feat in Mrs Gargantua: he lifts the veil that has long shrouded the idea of Cuba, preserving its allure even as he subjects it to lucid scrutiny. His Cuba emerges not only as myth or mirage, but as a political bestiary, at once real, marvellous, and profoundly human’

Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History

‘In this book JS Tennant shows us a mix of the fantastic creatures and resilient humans who inhabit that strange island: Cuba. Wrapped in the mists of isolation and entrenched in an ideology that has become obsolete in most of the world, Cuba has a curious reality: its pre-revolutionary time didn’t just fade away, it froze abruptly. Tennant explores such relics of that past to show the idiosyncrasy of a people and a revolution that has managed to exist in a space-time of its own’

Gioconda Belli, poet and former Sandinista guerrilla

JS Tennant is from North Yorkshire and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Salamanca and Cambridge. Formerly poetry editor at The White Review, he is the co-author of Cuba ‘62: preludes to a world crisis and European delegate of the Don Cornelius Soul Club, Guantánamo. Mrs Gargantua was the first English-language entry to have won the Michael Jacobs Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Journalism.