“The conversation, once everyone sat for dinner, was painstaking, fifteen people desperately waiting their turn to insert an opinion, nobody concerned with what anybody else thought about anything. Perhaps every conversation played out like this, and it was only now, aware of every move, every reaction, that Carmen realized it was a miracle human beings learned anything about each other at all.”

This novel is an intergenerational drama starting in a Cuban cigar factory in 1866, then moving to Miami in the present day.

The story deals with drug addiction, deportation, detention centers in the U.S. and finally, a smuggling plan to re-enter the U.S. The quote is from a family Thanksgiving dinner.

The story follows four generations of one family, and two generations of another family who lived next door.