Winner of the 2020 Michael Jacobs Prize; shortlisted for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award

Mrs Gargantua: Stories from Cuba by J.S. Tennant is a brilliantly unconventional and riveting ride through Cuba’s history, drawing on the David and Goliath dynamic of its confrontations with the US and other superpowers. It aspires to capture realities behind the fantastical, exoticised treatment Cuba often receives.

Mrs Gargantua deals with towering figures – both human and non-human – and ambitions which have left their mark on Cuba, the distorted means by which the island is often presented to the outside world. From Columbus and the conquistadores, Ptolemy to Paris Hilton, Hemingway, nuclear warheads and the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, from a nationalist sparrow ‘martyred’ during Cuba’s independence wars to Fidel Castro’s genetically modified super-cow, this non-fiction work exposes the country’s status as a social and biological testing ground and resource to be mined by larger nations.

The book’s title comes from an account of Maria Hoyt, a US heiress who raised a gorilla in Cuba (one of the first to do so beyond Africa). Later her pet was sold to a circus in the United States where she became a celebrity: the famous ‘Mrs Gargantua’. Her story is directly linked to Hoyt’s predecessor in monkey and ape husbandry, the Cuban Rosalía Abreu; reputedly the richest woman in Latin America and a legendary recluse, Abreu became the first person in history – at her mansion in Havana – to breed a chimpanzee in captivity, with unexpected and far-reaching consequences.

Like 'Mrs Gargantua' – Cuba has been endlessly subject to the whims of the human circus that tries to tame her.

The award-winning Mrs Gargantua forms an entirely original, compelling inventory of the author’s twenty-year relationship with the island and its people, while also attempting to sketch Cuba’s wider importance to a political understanding of the Americas, both in tangible and imaginary terms.

Winner of the 2020 Michael Jacobs Prize; shortlisted for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award

‘Mrs Gargantua is a treasure chest full of rare and exquisitely rendered stories about the remarkable characters whose lives and actions became interwoven with Cuba’s history. Columbus, Cortés, Churchill and Castro; all are here, along with many more, including a woman who loved gorillas, Napoleon’s deathbed doctor, and the guardian of a Soviet nuclear missile silo. As our guide, Tennant is an amiable, erudite writer who shares sides to Cuba few of us have seen before, underpinned by his love for that most extraordinary of Caribbean islands. ¡Viva Cuba!'

– Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

‘JS Tennant accomplishes a rare feat in Mrs Gargantua: he lifts the veil that has long shrouded the idea of Cuba, preserving its allure even as he subjects it to lucid scrutiny. His Cuba emerges not only as myth or mirage, but as a political bestiary, at once real, marvellous, and profoundly human’

– Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History

‘In this book JS Tennant shows us a mix of the fantastic creatures and resilient humans who inhabit that strange island: Cuba. Wrapped in the mists of isolation and entrenched in an ideology that has become obsolete in most of the world, Cuba has a curious reality: its pre-revolutionary time didn’t just fade away, it froze abruptly. Tennant explores such relics of that past to show the idiosyncrasy of a people and a revolution that has managed to exist in a space-time of its own’

– Gioconda Belli, poet and former Sandinista guerrilla

JS Tennant is from North Yorkshire and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Salamanca and Cambridge. Formerly poetry editor at The White Review, he is the co-author of Cuba '62: preludes to a world crisis and European delegate of the Don Cornelius Soul Club, Guantánamo. Mrs Gargantua was the first English-language entry to have won the Michael Jacobs Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Journalism. a world crisis. A second book about Cuba, Mrs Gargantua is the only English-language entry to have won the Michael Jacobs Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Journalism.