Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

📖 The Scoop

A dramatic novel of love, revolution, and redemption from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ironweed

When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, he has no idea that his own affinity for simple, declarative sentences will change his life radically overnight. So begins a tale of revolutionary intrigue, heroic journalism, crooked politicians, drug-running gangsters, Albany race riots, and the improbable rise of Fidel Castro.

Quinn's epic journey carries him through the nightclubs and jungles of Cuba and into the newsrooms and racially charged streets of Albany on the day Robert Kennedy is fatally shot in 1968. The odyssey brings Quinn, and his unpredictable Cuban wife, Renata, face-to-face with the darkest facets of human nature and illuminates the power of love in the presence of death.

Kennedy masterfully gathers together an unlikely cast of vivid characters in a breathtaking adventure full of music, mysticism, and murder. This is an unforgettably riotous story set against the landscape of the civil rights movement as it challenges the legendary and vengeful Albany political machine.



William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

Genre: Fiction / Historical / General (fancy, right?)