Pig's Foot

Description

Oscar Mandinga, great-grandchild of the founders of a small hamlet deep in the Cuban hinterland, is a sardonic teller of tales - some taller than others. But one day Oscar wakes to find himself utterly alone, the sole descendant of his family line. He is not sure what to do or where to go, but in the midst of this uncertainty, he holds fast to what his grandfather always told him: 'No man knows who he is until he knows his past.' So Oscar sets out to find his ancestral village and the meaning of the magical pig's-foot amulet he has inherited.

Carlos Acosta was born in Havana in 1973 and trained at the National Ballet School of Cuba. He has been a principal at the English National Ballet, the Houston Ballet, the American Ballet Theater and the Royal Ballet, and has danced as a guest artist all over the world, winning numerous international awards. He is the author of the autobiography No Way Home. www.carlosacosta.com Frank Wynne has won three major prizes for his translations, including the 2002 IMPAC for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He is also the translator of Tomas Eloy Martinez's Purgatory and Marcelo Figueras's Kamchatka.

Vivid, fast-moving and often dazzling ... The pace leaves you breathless * Kate Saunders, The Times * Pig's Foot is as catchy as a piece of Cuban music, defers to Latin America's literary tradition and shimmers with a likable swagger all its own * Eileen Battersby, Irish Times * Vibrant * Sunday Telegraph * Elegant and seductive * Guardian * A little pressure cooker of a novel * Daily Express * Spellbinding ... Acosta does for prose what he has done for the ballet, bringing to it a muscular sexiness and a rural saltiness * Independent on Sunday * An exuberantly enjoyable tale * Guardian * An enormously warm-hearted novel: tearful at times, triumphant at others * Mail on Sunday *