The House on the Lagoon
by Rosario Ferré
A Puerto Rican family saga and the woman writing it down.
you want to understand Puerto Rico's political history through the people who lived inside it across a century
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Supports independent bookstores
Secondhand & sustainable
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Isabel is writing the history of her husband's family across five generations in Puerto Rico — from the Spanish colonial period through American occupation to the present. Her husband keeps trying to take the manuscript away. Ferré uses the struggle over who gets to tell the story as the story itself — the battle between the nationalist and the assimilationist, between the woman's version and the man's, between independence and statehood. The most architecturally ambitious Puerto Rican novel ever written in English. A dispatch about whose version of history gets to survive.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Puerto Rico • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Puerto Rican author
- Themes
- True Cost of EmpireAfter EmpireGenerations
