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Now Then
Morgan Radford
Amistad
352 Pages
Publishing Date: May 5, 2026
This is a beautifully written dual timeline work of historical fiction that also happens to be a debut novel. I was totally bowled over. One timeline was modern and American (1991 in Cambridge, Massachusetts_ and the other was Cuba during the revolution (1957). As fascinated as I am by Cuba, it was a given that I was going to read this novel. The only other I have read that has written about Cuba has been Chanel Cleeton.
This also doubles at a coming of age novel. We meet Liliana, who is a student at Harvard, having had to fight her way through an impoverished childhood to get there. There is a great deal to unpack in this novel: relationships between mother and daughter, assimilation, class and race, and romance. If anything, there were moments where it almost seemed too much to delve into and my head was ready to come off seeing how unafraid this author was to explore difficult issues and not offer the reader easy answers. There were a few moments toward the end where it seemed the author was a tad bit lecturing, as if there were things she needed to get off her chest. However, having read her afterward, it seems that this novel was a monumental effort, including many things from her own life, so perhaps she did have things that she needed to say. In addition, I often do not like the romance in many of these types of books but I do like how it was handled here and how complicated some of the characters were.
I don’t know where the author will go from here. The difficulty with using material from one’s own life in novels, is that future books without that source material may lack that emotion that is present here. I will look forward to her next book to see what she does next.
Thanks to NetGalley and Amistad for an advanced copy of this book. All of the opinions herein are my own.
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