★ 10/23/2023

The enthralling latest from Henríquez (The Book of Unknown Americans) tells the stories of migrant laborers, locals, and others affected by the Panama Canal project in 1907. Born and bred in Panama City, Francisco Aquino is a proud fisherman. His headstrong teenage son Omar yearns for more than his father’s predictable life at sea, however, and gets hired at Culebra Cut, a notoriously difficult labor site, where he works to dig the canal alongside Barbadians, Jamaicans, and Haitians. Francisco, who calls the Americans “enemy invaders” for building the canal and harbors resentment over U.S. intervention in Panama’s 1903 separatist movement, disapproves. There’s also 16-year-old Ada Bunting, who arrives from Barbados to work as a washer woman so she can send money to help her sister, who has pneumonia. Her story is linked with that of Tennessee scientist John Oswald, who comes to Panama to study tropical diseases with his wife Marian, who contracts pneumonia and is cared for by Ada. Meanwhile, the residents of the southern town of Gatun learn that their community has been earmarked as the site of the canal’s dam. The author delves deeply into themes of colonialism and labor exploitation, showing how the men take quinine daily to ward off tropical diseases while an American foreman rules over their worksite with an iron fist. Henríquez’s pitch-perfect novel has the feel of a classic. (Mar.)

The Great Divide is Cristina Henríquez’s novel reconstruction of the Panama Canal, a well-crafted and meticulously researched marriage of history and story.”
— Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

“Cristina Henriquez gives us cause to celebrate with this sweeping novel. It speeds us into a wild world of adventure and danger, epic visions of the creation of the Panama Canal. There isn’t another book like it. A welcome return by one of our finest voices.”
— Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Good Night, Irene

"Against the backdrop of the construction of the Panama Canal, Cristina Henriquez’s commanding and fearless prose conducts us through the very depth of the Panamanian jungle, where young Ada and Omar fight bravely— for themselves, their families and their communities survival— in a rapidly changing world. Violent empire and volatile sickness combine for harrowing effect in this vivid novel that interrogates all that is sacrificed in the name of progress. By turns macabre and also truly joyful, The Great Divide left me with a powerful ache for forgotten histories that will not soon leave me." — Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming

"A gorgeous, sweeping epic that draws together a truly unforgettable cast of characters. I loved it."
— Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful

"Henríquez’s pitch-perfect novel has the feel of a classic." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The Great Divide is a beautifully written novel that is, at first glance, about the construction of the Panama Canal, but really, it's about the people whose lives were changed in ways good and bad, by man's insatiable desire to conquer—land, other people, the frailties of the human body. The prose offers both intimacy and the expansiveness of a sprawling epic. From the first page to the last, I found myself deeply invested in each of the characters so full of want, so willing to do everything and anything to satisfy those yearnings." — Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women

"The Great Divide feels both sweeping—power and science, history and empire—and incredibly precise in its rendering of the human soul. Henríquez writes gorgeously, creating indelible characters whom you’ll never want to leave.” — Justin Torres, author of Blackouts

“ [A] rich, evocative slice of life from a little-known chapter of history.” — Reader's Digest

“A compassionate and insightful historical epic.” — LitHub

“Cristina Henríquez paints an intricate, layered portrait of a monumental moment in the history of the Americas: the construction of the Panama Canal. Set in 1907, this polyvocal novel is a powerful act of witness and remembrance." — BookPage

“The Great Divide is a sweeping epic that dissects the physical and emotional toll of economic progress.” — Time magazine

“Great historical fiction has to be gripping to work, fusing fact and fiction to deliver information while still keeping readers glued to the pages and invested in the characters. Henríquez accomplishes that and much more here, delivering a sweeping epic that shines a light on the small but very significant kind of stories that were lost in the shadow of a monumental construction."
— Gabino Iglesias, Boston Globe

“Henríquez’s ambitious historical novel revolves around the construction of the Panama Canal…[A] sweeping saga involving the laborers, fishmongers, activists, journalists and neighbors whose lives intersect during this significant time in history.”
— Washington Post

“[The Great Divide] positions [Henríquez ]…in the company of such authors as Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and Francisco Goldman, 'who write about places inextricably tied to American history, giving us a better understanding of what that history really is.'"
— New York Times

“The Great Divide joins novels by Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisernos, and Gabriel García Marquez in deepening the people’s literary history of Latin America. Henríquez is a master of prose whose enchanting words capture the landscape. . . Henríquez is equally adept at showing the diversity and complexity of her characters....[T]he book’s ambition is undeniably valuable: This is about the intimate lives of people who are often forgotten, dismissed and willing to sacrifice body and soul to provide a better life for their loved ones." — Washington Post

“[Henríquez’s] work . . . has been some of the warmest, welcoming contemporary fiction on the subject of international borders and families. . . . The Great Divide is set a century ago during the digging of the Panama Canal, and not on the fringes, but among men constructing it, international emigrants hoping to find work in a prosperous Panama, locals protesting Americans, and Americans both eager to help and make a buck. It’s a brisk 319-page epic about love and violence that, seamlessly, holds history in balance.” — Chicago Tribune

A compassionate and insightful historical epic.”

A gorgeous bit of storytelling…[and] a deeply meaningful, character-driven narrative that brings momentous history to new life.”

Golden Voice narrator Robin Miles’s…lovely, warm voice illuminates the action by adopting varied accents and wildly different personalities…Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award.”

Golden Voice narrator Robin Miles's evocative performance of Cristina Henríquez's novel about the building of the Panama Canal takes its time, which feels right for a book with many threads. Set midway through the canal's multi year construction, the plot follows several central characters as they navigate personal dramas and canal-related crises. Miles's lovely, warm voice illuminates the action by adopting varied accents and wildly different personalities. Sixteen-year-old Asa from Barbados wants to earn money for a sister's operation; local fisherman Francisco hates the foreign-owned canal, where his son Omar wields a pickax; Tennessee scientist John is intent on eradicating malaria while his neglected wife battles the illness. These and many other stories intertwine in this moving and deeply researched tale. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

2023-11-17
An anti-imperialist fairy tale about the building of the Panama Canal.

Henríquez’s novel begins in 1907, with work on the canal well underway, and reveals how its construction changes the lives of multiple characters of varying nationalities, classes, and races, each in Panama for their own reasons. Henríquez is skilled at juggling the many subplots. Among the central characters, Ada Bunting from Barbados is the stereotypical sentimental heroine. The biracial 16-year-old has come to Panama to earn money to save her ailing sister’s life; she gets a job nursing the sick wife of wealthy, idealistic, but emotionally stunted malaria researcher John Oswald (whose under-explored complexity makes him one of the book’s more interesting characters). Plucky Ada begins a tepid romance with young Panamanian Omar Aquino, whose broken relationship with his fisherman father Francisco exemplifies the divided loyalties and resentments of Panamanians treated as second-class citizens in their own country. Francisco sells to fishmonger Joaquín, whose wife ropes her husband into organizing a demonstration of passive resistance against Canal Commission orders to dismantle and move her entire hometown. A host of other characters are sketched in, from an Antiguan cook who undermines Ada to an inept French doctor, an intuitive palm reader, and a Barbadian sugar planter in love with Ada’s mother but too weak-willed to fight for her. Along the way, Henríquez plugs in the history that many North Americans probably don’t know: the Panamanian civil war and intervention by the United States, which paid the country, newly independent from Colombia, $10 million dollars for full control of the Canal Zone. The depiction of white North Americans and Caribbean planters as at best clueless, more often mercenary and cruelly racist, is undoubtedly accurate. Unfortunately, and despite Henríquez’s lyrical prose, they never feel fully realized as individuals. Neither does virtuous Ada, the noble Panamanians, or Mrs. Oswald, a representative of white female victimhood who has sacrificed her intellectual ambition for a loveless marriage.

Despite panoramic ambitions, the novel never quite catches fire.