The Divine Husband

A Novel

By: Franscisco Goldman

Narrated by: Yetta Gottesman

Francisco Goldman, one of the most talented and award-winning writers of his generation, released his third novel, The Divine Husband, to wide and rapturous acclaim. Beginning with a single, possibly scandalous love poem by Jose Marti, Cuba's greatest revolutionary-poet-hero with an infamous secret love life, The Divine Husband is the story of Maria de las Nieves Moran, a former nun forced out of her convent by a revolution in a Central American capital.

While making her way in this metropolis nicknamed "The Little Paris", she enrolls in a writing class taught by Jose Marti, under whose spell Maria de las Nieves and her classmates quickly fall. Soon after, Maria de las Nieves flees her home for New York, where Marti has also relocated - a crucial interval that shaped Marti's consciousness. Nearly a century later, an elderly woman in Massachusetts hires a college student to investigate her claim that she is the illegitimate offspring of Marti and Maria de las Nieves.

Mixing a lovingly re-created historical past with often hilarious, ironic, and moving conjecture that brings to life an unforgettable heroine and her remarkable collection of friends, nemeses, and rival suitors, The Divine Husband is a magnificent American novel.

©2004 Francisco Goldman. Most of the quotations from and commentary on the writings of Sor María de Agreda in chapter one are taken from the book The Visions of Sor María de Agreda: Writing, Knowledge and Power by Clark Colahan, published by University of Arizona Press in 1994. Further quotations are taken from T. D. Kendrick’s translations of Sor María, from his book Mary of Agreda, published byRoutledge & Kegan Paul in 1967; the short quotation on page 49 is from Antonio Rubial García’s La santidad controvertida.Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.