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Winner of the Herralde Novel Prize, The Key Biscayne Affair is a darkly funny coming-of-age novel where Florida’s sun-drenched strangeness meets the dangers of derelict parenting and misplaced devotion.An eccentric Spanish philosophy professor relocates with his two children, a boy and a girl, from Boston to a gated island off the coast of Miami. The kids have come to the US to learn English and spend time with their father after a heated custody battle. But as the professor is embraced by a glittering social scene and his seemingly fun, innocent antics tip into recklessness, the children receive a very different kind of education.
In this lush, sharply observed novel, an unnamed, unreliable narrator remembers her surreal stay on Key Biscayne, where nobody lives unless they have something to hide. As the narrator is gradually drawn into the island’s morally ambiguous world, putting her innocence at risk, she begins to overidentify with her father. She becomes not just witness but also accomplice to his erratic behavior, acquiescing to his efforts to isolate herself and her brother from their concerned mother, whose calls from Spain go unanswered.
The Key Biscayne Affair is a tender, disorienting, and deeply disquieting coming-of-age story disguised as a psychological thriller. Xita Rubert delivers a powerful meditation on childhood and the knotty truths that memory leaves behind.
Xita Rubert is a Spanish novelist. In 2024, she won the Herralde Novel Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for the novel in the Spanish language, for The Key Biscayne Affair. Her first novel, My Days with the Kopp Family, was translated into several languages. She is based in New York and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University.
Aleksandar Hemon has written poetry, nonfiction, short story collections, and novels, most recently The World and All That It Holds. His earlier novel The Lazarus Project, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Other notable works include his autobiography The Book of My Lives, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award; the short story collection Love & Obstacles; and The Nowhere Man, also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
This event is cosponsored by the Princeton Public Library and Princeton University's Humanities Council and Program in Creative Writing.
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Labyrinth Books Princeton, 122 Nassau St, Princeton, NJ 08542-4516, United States
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