British-born Maggie Barrington has become a very successful New York lawyer. When her marriage breaks up, she goes to Cuba, ostensibly on business but secretly in search of her cantankerous Marxist concert pianist father who decamped to Havana when she was a child and whom she has cut out of her life.When she finally tracks him down, she is pitched into a series of life-changing dramas that entangle her not only with her new-found family but also in the shadowy life of Cuba itself. She crosses barriers that in the past would have been unthinkable and that turn her into someone forced to try to flee the island to escape justice.As the hurricane season whips through Havana, Maggie discovers a buried part of her old self.“What a piece of storytelling... Strong passions, terrific characters...fascinating Cuba, a hurricane that made me feel that I was in the thick of it...the perfectly accomplished full circle of it all!”– Hilary Norman, bestselling novelist“I was riveted... Great story, great characters, great sense of place...tension superbly maintained throughout!”– Timothy West, actor
Guy Slater is a writer, theatre and TV director, and producer of many long-running TV drama series, including Miss Marple, starring Joan Hickson, and Love Hurts,starring Zoe Wanamaker and Adam Faith. He founded and ran the Horseshoe Theatre Company at the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke and on tour, and has written over twenty TV dramas, seven radio dramas, four stage plays and has published five books. He knows Cuba – the setting for Hurricane Maggie – well, having first visited it when his father was the British Ambassador in Havana.
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10 reviews
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This is a cracking first novel from top producer/director Guy Slater and a real page-turner. Written as a confessional to her children, high-powered lawyer Maggie Harrington tells of her visit to Cuba, ostensibly on business but also to track down her father, a celebrated pianist who had walked out on his family when she was a child. In that extraordinary country, she discovers much more than she had ever bargained for, and is caught up in an emotional and all too real hurricane. The characters are as vivid as the locations, and this novel also raises disturbing moral issues. Strongly recommended.
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Post-Castro Havana's sweaty, sexy heat and shady political underbelly provide the setting for professional Maggie Barrington's reconnection with her irascible old Marxist father and an unknown half-brother and stepmother.
As she becomes involved in the lives of this newly-found foreign family Maggie's preconceptions become scrambled and force her to examine her values and her own arid life.
While outside a hurrricane rages Maggie grapples with her own demons as she struggles with the redemptive power of love, with shocking consequences.
This is a short novel, packed with entralling incident and colourful characters. Havana is brought vividly to life and the reader is steeped in the dilemmas of present-day Cubans. An exciting read.
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A great and gripping story and a fascinating insight into Cuban life. It's a touching reminder of how we can change our values and loyalties in later life.
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Bravo to Guy Slater for a carefully-plotted, original story with well-developed characters and a wonderful description of Cuban life. The clash in values of a wealthy American lawyer with Republican leanings and her Marxist father provides a strong undercurrent to a denouement that shocks. Highly recommended for a good read.
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A compulsive narrative with a range of striking characters in a milieu (present-day Cuba), which rarely figures in British novels. Strongly recommended.
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"A first novel of quality unusual in contemporary fiction of realism and beyond, a story with an ever-tightening emotional grip. HURRICANE MAGGIE has a plot of structure sufficiently sound to sustain an almost unbearable yet entirely believable series of crises brought to climax by an affluent American woman lawyer’s visit to post-Fidel Cuba - appropriately like a destructive tropical storm. I look forward to the movie."
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Hurrican Maggie has, at its centre, a really great idea for a story and Guy Slater cleverly develops this into a great literary adventure. Maggie Barrington arrives in Cuba with the rather hazy intention of finding her long-lost father and seeking to build bridges with him. She finds him all right, but is astonished to discover new members of his family that she had never heard about. As she gets to grips with new family dynamics in this strange but exotic place she finds herself needing to resolve challenging questions about love, about value and values and about life and death. Driven by a fresh sense of what's right and what's wrong she decides upon a terrifying course of action which brings the story to its exciting climax. Guy Slater's evocation of Cuba is superb and his descriptions of the central characters are wonderfully realised. Hurrican Maggie really does strike me as a most accomplished piece of story-telling. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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A great first novel from an author with a deep, lasting and affectionate relationship with Cuba and its people. With her naive western arrogance and comparative wealth, Maggie sets out to reconnect with her past.. But in so doing she unwittingly embarks on a journey of self destruction not only to herself and those she had come to find but to those she discovered.on the way
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