Cristina García has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators. The most-rated is Dreaming in Cuban.
The Lady Matador's Hotel
Summary
National Book Award finalist Cristina García delivers a powerful and gorgeous novel about the intertwining lives of the denizens of a luxurious hotel in an unnamed Central American capital in the midst of political turmoil. The lives of six men and women converge over the course of one week. There is a Japanese Mexican American matadora in town for a bull-fighting competition; an ex-guerrilla now working as a waitress in the hotel coffee shop; a Korean manufacturer with an underage mistress ensconced in the honeymoon suite; an international adoption lawyer of German descent; a colonel who committed atrocities during his country’s long civil war; and a Cuban poet who has come with his American wife to adopt a local infant. With each day, their lives become further entangled, resulting in the unexpected - the clash of histories and the pull of revenge and desire. Cristina García’s magnificent orchestration of politics, the intimacies of daily life, and the frailty of human nature unfolds in a moving, ambitious, often comic, and unforgettable tale.
©2010 Cristina Garcia (P)2021 Random House Audio
Here in Berlin
Summary
An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character - vibrant and post-apocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists.
Here in Berlin, she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn't believe him, the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found, the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes, a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them, and the son of a zookeeper who fights to keep the animals safe from both the war and an increasingly starving populace.
Bringing the people of this famed city to life, critically acclaimed novelist Cristina Garcia aligns the stories of the past with those of the future.
©2017 Cristina Garcia (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC
A Handbook to Luck
Summary
It is the late 1960s. We meet three children: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador and forced to leave school to help support her family, her beloved older brother having already left home; and Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon's daughter in Tehran, her mother concerned only with appearances, her father an often foolishly vocal opponent of the Shah. As we follow them across the next 20 years, we see chance draw Leila and Marta into Enrique's life; Leila and Enrique loving and losing each other, with Marta the means to renewed hope for Enrique; and, throughout, "good luck or bad tilting life one way or another" for all of them. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement through time, and its subtle revelation of the essential hopes and doubts of ordinary people whose lives are made extraordinary by circumstance, A Handbook to Luck is Cristina García's most beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel yet.
©2007 Cristina Garcia (P)2007 Books on Tape
I Wanna Be Your Shoebox
Summary
Because Yumi Ruíz-Hirsch has grandparents from Japan, Cuba, and Brooklyn, her mother calls her a poster child for the 21st century. Yumi would laugh if only her life wasn't getting as complicated as her heritage. All of a sudden she's starting eighth grade with a girl who collects tinfoil and a boy who dresses like a squid. Her mom's found a new boyfriend, and her punk-rock father still can't sell a song. She's losing her house; she's losing her school orchestra. And worst of all she's losing her grandfather Saul. Yumi wishes everything could stay the same. But as she listens to Saul tell his story, she learns that nobody ever asks you if you're ready for life to happen. It just happens. The choice is either to sit and watch or to join the dance. National Book Award finalist Cristina García's first middle-grade novel celebrates the chaotic, crazy, and completely amazing patchwork that makes up our lives.
©2008 Cristina Garcia (P)2008 Random House, Inc.
Dreaming in Cuban
Summary
“Impressive...[Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.” (Time) Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban: “Remarkable...an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic...evocative and lush.” (San Francisco Chronicle) “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.” (The Washington Post) “Brilliant.... With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.” (The Denver Post)
©2021 Cristina García (P)2021 Random House Audio