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Published May 2015
400 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
When Maria Vazquez returns to Nicaragua for her beloved grandfather's funeral, she brings with her a mysterious package from her grandmother's past--and a secret of her own. And she also carries the burden of her tense relationship with her mother Ninexin, once a storied revolutionary, now a tireless government employee. Between Maria and Ninexin lies a chasm created by the death of Maria's father, who was killed during the revolution when Maria was an infant, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother Isabela as Ninexin worked to build the new Nicaragua. As Ninexin tries to reach her daughter, and Maria wrestles with her expectations for her romance with an older man, Isabela, the mourning widow, is lost in memories of attending boarding school in 1950's New Orleans, where she loved and lost almost sixty years ago. When the three women come together to bid farewell to the man who anchored their family, they are forced to confront their complicated, passionate relationships with each other and with their country--and to reveal the secrets that each of them have worked to conceal.
Lushly evocative of Nicaragua, its tumultuous history, and vibrant present, Eleni N. Gage's The Ladies of Managua brings you into the lives of three strong and magnetic women, as they uncover the ramifications of the choices they made in their pasts and begin to understand the ways in which love can shape their futures.
"[A] sweet, stately story... glimpses of the beautiful landscape and the history of Nicaragua provide a backdrop to a universal narrative of hurt and forgiveness." - Publishers Weekly
"Gage carefully and thoughtfully explores the social demands placed on women and the repercussions of submitting to or defying them." - Kirkus Reviews
"The three women at the center of Eleni Gage's new novel will stir readers with their fierce voices and independent spirits. Multigenerational and international in scope, this tale of love, betrayal, and nation-building is both intimate and confiding, soaring and passionate. A luscious read." - Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Crescent and Birds of Paradise
"A work of fiction that is, at its core, very real, full of vivid descriptions of a country I know intimately. I recommend it highly." - Ernesto Cardenal, nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature
"Eleni Gage vividly conveys the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, all the while exploring the tensions that emerge when national struggles disrupt the bonds of family... Readers are going to fall hard for this book." - Chantel Acevedo, author of The Distant Marvels
This information about The Ladies of Managua was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eleni N. Gage is a journalist who writes regularly for publications including Real Simple, Parade, Travel+Leisure, The New York Times, T: The New York Times Travel Magazine, Dwell, Elle, Elle Decor and The American Scholar. Currently Executive Editor at Martha Stewart Weddings and formerly beauty editor at People, Eleni graduated with an AB in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard University and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York City with her husband and their young daughter.
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