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In the spring of 1980, as the port of Mariel opens and a flotilla of small boats carries 125,000 Cubans toward Florida, attorney Sonia Peraza finds the past she buried refusing to stay there.
Sonia built a life in America on distance - from the island she left, from the girl she was, from the grief she never had time to grieve. But the boatlift doesn't just bring strangers to her shores. It brings memory, obligation, and the unfinished business of a family split by a revolution she was too young to understand and too proud to talk about.
As Sonia is drawn into the chaos of the crisis - legal, human, and deeply personal - she has to decide what she owes the people still arriving, the country that shaped her, and the woman she left behind in Havana.
Mariel is a literary historical novel about exile, inheritance, and the cost of rebuilding a self across two countries - grounded in one of the most dramatic chapters of the Cuban-American story.
Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.
Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.
He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.
These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.
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