Cages by Chantel Acevedo (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Literary - Hispanic & Latino - LGBTQ+ - Gay

RELEASE DATE: 6/9/2026  (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE) 

Cages is a sweeping, polyphonic portrait of a man seen through the eyes of those who loved him, feared him, and betrayed him.

At its center is Felix—a zookeeper in 1960s Cuba, an exile in London, and finally a dying man in Miami.  His story is pieced together like a puzzle that can never fully be solved by one who knew him only as an absence and seeks to know him before it is too late. 

In Cuba, during the Missile Crisis, Felix risks everything for an illicit love affair with René, a fellow keeper. In a society where homosexuality is branded “counterrevolutionary,” their tenderness unfolds in the shadow of danger, betrayal, and political oppression. In London, Felix and his wife Anabel navigate exile and reinvention, while an aspiring actress named Claudia finds herself drawn into their orbit, her ambitions and desires colliding with Felix’s own hunger for connection. Years later, Virgilio—Anabel’s devoted brother—recounts the disintegration of Felix’s marriage and the exile that follows, even as he steps in to protect the family Felix abandoned. 

From Anabel, long silent about her complicity in the events that forced Felix’s flight from Cuba, to Rita, the daughter who knew him differently, each voice brings a sliver of truth. Together, these testimonies form a mosaic of longing, deception, survival, and reconciliation. 

Spanning Havana, London, and Miami, Acevedo’s luminous, formally inventive novel explores exile, forbidden love, fractured families, the nature of truth, and the stories we tell to make sense of the people we cannot forget.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Chantel Acevedo  was born in Miami to Cuban parents. She is the author of The Living Infinite (Europa, 2017); The Distant Marvels (Europa, 2015), a Carnegie Medal Finalist; A Falling Star (Carolina Wren Press, 2014); and Love and Ghost Letters (St. Martins, 2006), winner of the Latino International Book Award. Acevedo is a professor of English at the University of Miami, where she teaches in the MFA program.

"Cages is the hard, but delicately rendered realization that you can only really know the fragments of a person they present to you, and sometimes love can cause you to cling to those fragments well after they've ripped you apart. With heart-rending efficiency, Acevedo has gifted readers with a sweeping, historical tale that is tender and resonant, reconciliatory and liberating."--Addie Citchens, author of Dominion

"With Cages Acevedo has written the impossible: an Odyssey for the Cuban 20th century...Love, revolution, exile, betrayal, heartbreak, sirens--it's all here, raised to indelible heights by Acevedo's incomparable gifts. Felix, the fractured heart of this kaleidoscopic masterpiece, is both shattered and shattering."--Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

"Acevedo is one of the most versatile and exciting writers of her generation, with a voice that speaks not only to the American experience, but to our universal humanity."--Julianna Baggot, author of the Pure trilogy