In the following review, Thomas Curwen describes Silent Wing as a torrid love story on its surface, but with moving echoes of Cuban poet Jose Marti's life.

As Cuba edges toward the great unknown—life after Castro, that is—everyone, it seems, wants a piece of the 19th century poet and patriot Jose Marti. The pope quoted him in his January sermons to the Cuban people, and Castro puts him before Marx and Lenin in his revolutionary pantheon. Some ideologies make strange bedfellows and even stranger novels.

At first blush, "Silent Wing" is a torrid love story based on Marti's life, so filled with troubled sighs and quiet yearnings that you have to wonder what Jose Raul Bernardo is up to. His new novel comes as close to bodice-ripping as you can without popping buttons or tripping over cliches.

When we first meet Marti, here renamed Julian...