Finalist for The George Garrett Fiction Prize

Before she dies, Nina Tobaya sets out to leave her daughter the truth about the man she loved—and the country that never stopped calling her home.

That man is Teo Caballero, the childhood friend Nina reunites with when she returns to post-revolutionary Havana as a young journalist. A gifted boxer with championship dreams, Teo becomes the love of her life. Together they build a family, until ambition, politics, and Teo’s danceaway nature drive them apart.

As Teo fights his way from Havana’s boxing gyms to the glittering arenas of Las Vegas, Nina raises their daughter in Miami, determined to create a life defined by more than loss. Divided by borders yet bound by memory, they move through two countries where every departure exacts its own irrevocable price.

Dogs of Cuba is a sweeping literary novel of love, exile, and the ties that endure across generations. Moving between Havana and Miami, past and present, it explores how memory reshapes the stories we tell, how betrayal and sacrifice echo through families, and how the bonds between people—and between nations—remain long after history insists they have been broken.

Praise for Dogs of Cuba

“For six decades, writers have been trying to capture the seductive essence of Cuba’s profoundly magnificent, sweaty, hilarious, corrupt and singular soul. An impossible task, of course, but Edie Meidav comes closest to achieving the impossible. Channeling this tale of obsessive love and battle through a national obsession far deeper than any ransacked political belief, flicking the reader with jabbing poetic prose, Dogs of Cuba renders life in that country—and ours—with a piercing inside-out clarity. Read it.” 

—S.L. Price, author of Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports and The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse

“Dogs of Cuba is a wise, heart-breaking novel by a writer who fully understands what happens to a dream deferred. Edie Emanuela Meidav has talent to spare and this story of a doomed, hopeful love match between Cuban kids who grew up together, one chasing glory as a boxer, the other loving him, would turn the heart of a stone. I read every word and was hungry for more.”

—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and The Birdwatcher

“Gorgeously rhythmic and noir-raw, Dogs of Cuba is a sparring match between bodies (human and land), between the heart and the ‘best hell’ of the mind, between Teo and Nina, trapped by lust and illusion. What a rapturous novel, the most emotionally alive love story I’ve read in years—a ‘mad up-down blur.’ Shred the redemption arc and step into the ring, I dare you.”

—Margot Douaihy, USA Today best-selling author of Scorched Grace, Blessed Water, and Divine Ruin

“In this smoldering tale of love and politics, Edie Meidav plucks figures of geopolitical noir—a reporter filing from Havana; a Cuban revolutionary boxer—and shapes them into earthy bodies living out humid, lyrical passages of yearning and doubt. A little like Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted, this is a novel that elegantly fractures a genre to reveal its splintered, dazzling, multifaceted truth.”

—Jon Raymond, author and screenwriter of God and Sex and First Cow

“Edie Meidav’s lush new novel, Dogs of Cuba, swirls between past and present, love and boxing, dreams and gritty reality, Havana and Miami, creating a sense of in-betweenness that is at once intoxicating and introspective. As the narrator says, ‘Cuba carved pieces out of all of us,’ and indeed this is a novel that reveals the mix of hope and despair that so many have experienced in being shaped and reshaped by the island that is still seeking its destiny.”

—Ruth Behar, author of The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart

“For Edie Meidav, language is not merely functional. Language to Meidav is texture and meaning – rich evocations of people and places, twined with challenging circumstances and life’s complicated choices. She proved this vividly in such novels as Crawl Space and Lola, California and does so once again in Dogs of Cuba. In this engaging book, Meidav turns her attention to boxing, as revealed in such thoughtful passages as this: ‘Like that riddle I used to ask our daughter: what is both possible and impossible? And she was so good at waiting as if she could figure it out, as if answers could arrive on a tradewind or something more solid, the perfection of a companion better than a sphinx. Every fight has a thesis and the end of the thesis is always the hardest to prove, as Perez, the theoretician of Cuban boxing used to say.’ This kind of prose makes Meidav’s work ceaselessly captivating: from a sport, we explore a life.”

—Joel Drucker, author of Jimmy Connors Saved My Life