“An erudite yet absorbing adventure story . . . A book full of riches—stylistic, sensory, visual.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Extraordinary.” —The New Yorker

“The most remarkable translating feat I encountered in 2023 comes courtesy of Adrian Nathan West, who in The Lost Steps and Explosion in a Cathedral brings the almost orgiastically baroque prose of Alejo Carpentier into glorious English.” —Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal, via Twitter

“An absolutely magnificent piece of literature . . . The prose is mesmerizing, and it’s one of those books where I just want to have it tattooed on me in its entirety to keep with me forever.” —BuzzFeed

“The greatest novel to have appeared in Latin America in our time.” —Le Figaro Littéraire

“Beautiful and stirring . . . One of [Carpentier’s] finest works . . . which for many readers is the most alluring of his novels.” -Leonardo Padura, from the Introduction

Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century, as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Kingdom of This World. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Havana, Cuba, Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France, where he lived until his death.
Adrian Nathan West (translator) has translated more than thirty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German, including Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, a finalist for both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and the novel My Father’s Diet, and his essays and literary criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Baffler. He lives in Philadelphia.
Leonardo Padura (introduction) is the most internationally successful contemporary Cuban novelist, as well as a journalist and critic. His novels featuring the detective Mario Conde have been translated into many languages and have won literary prizes around the world. Padura lives in Havana.