“If Carlos Manuel Alvarez’s debut novel The Fallen is any indicator, he is a Cuban writer to watch. His writing is intelligent, powerful, and insightful, and his short novel will prove to be enlightening for those who have visited Cuba, or wish to.”

“A searing work of literary excellence, Cuban writer Álvarez’s disturbing, dazzling debut novel arrives stateside, Anglophone-enabled by award-winning Irish writer/translator Wynne. Álvarez unravels this story of an imploding family-in-crisis with symmetrical precision. The novel is in five succinct sections, each of which Álvarez further divides to present the four family members’ points of view, rotating their perspectives in a pattern—visually and narratively—throughout. Although Álvarez’s characters are named, the chapter headings—son, mother, father, daughter—suggest that what happens to this family could happen to any family..”

“In chapters which alternate between the perspectives of the four family members, Álvarez slowly and cleverly builds up a picture of a family unit on the brink of collapse.”

“In such a small amount of pages, The Fallen is abundantly expressive yet leaves so much unsaid…The Fallen is the story of a family; not a romanticized saga, but a tale of unconditional love and friendship. Through careful and subtle prose, the strain and suffering in every voice emerges loud and clear. Carlos Manuel Álvarez has painted a powerful, burning image of illness, isolation and harrowing rancour.”

“A dreamlike yet insightful novel of a family and a country decaying from the inside. (...) Álvarez has written an unnervingly subtle and effective exploration of the cost of blind idealism on families.”

“A searing work of literary excellence. . . . Álvarez unravels this story of an imploding family-in-crisis with symmetrical precision.”

“Álvarez’s fittingly surreal gloss of insight on his characters’ generational divide gives the book real power. . . . [An] elegant debut.”

“In a dysfunctional environment, deception invades private family life. The lines between truths and lies are blurred. In a poetic telling, this short novel explores the human capacity to love and to hurt.”

“Álvarez does a neat job in this very short but nutritious novel of establishing the personalities of his characters firmly enough that it comes as a real shock when he upends our expectations of how they might behave.”

“Los caídos does not rise from the ruins it doesn’t inscribe itself in any mausoleum or prepare any future. Through the story of a family, narrated in four voices, it plunges us in the labyrinth of the island, without falling into common clichés, propagandist ideas or anti-establishment reactions. It is a drama that has no time for regret. Its pristine and masterful writing covers the tense and rough reality of four survivors of a complex existence.”

“Cuban author Carlos Manuel Álvarez already proved his talent in La tribu, his first book of journalistic pieces. Despite his youth, Álvarez has an ancient voice, tightened over the gorges of poetry and the result is even more astonishing, devoid of any desire to please readers with unnecessary prances. In The Fallen every voice has its own music of sadness, its own rhythms of isolation, its own lexicon of defeat. This novel is a subtle masterpiece.”

“A style that is concentrated on itself; reflexive and with a great control of the psychological nuances and narrative texture, with few temporary marks and without the pop background sound that we are accustomned to. These are the greatest achievements of this remarkable novel… Los caídos is not a frontal and explicit critic of the Cuban regime; it is more interested in questioning how the ideology of a big project works in the daily life of a family, how the daily miseries manage to reveal the social “truth” of a regime.”

“Los caídos is a quaking bog of sadness mixed with a vocation of impossible justice.”

“Los caídos is a chronicle about Cuba where, contrary to journalism, you have to look inside to see what is going on outside. The family that it portrays is at the same time metaphor of the Cuban society of a particular time (or the confrontation of two different periods) and a reflexion of what is happening on the streets… These well-crafted characters deserve attention and love; this natural prose that is so appropriate to the story must be savored slowly.”

“Carlos Manuel Álvarez does not turn to the many clichés that have emerged after the drift of the Castro regime and its effects in Cuban life. His testimony is full of truth and human dimension.”

“From the first pages, one realizes that one is in the presence of pure literature. We know, at the beginning of the book, that the mother has not fallen, but that she will, for it is announced, and when it happens, we will have all fallen alongside her.”

“A beautiful and painful novel that demonstrates the power of fiction to pursue the unutterable.”

“A war foretold that never takes place. A death foretold that never takes place. And in the middle of this is the inevitable collapse of a family and a country. The Fallen is a subtle, intelligent and profoundly moving novel which sketches, in elegant and thoughtful prose, a rarely seen Cuban landscape.”

“The best in Latin American literature is here: with the precocious skill of someone who is a paragon of narrative resources and sensitivity, Carlos Manuel Álvarez vividly portrays the only identity that really matters: not national, but human. The Fallen is a museum of solitude and of the cracks separating our inner world from the one we live in and from those with whom we coexist.”