Celia Cantú, a pediatrician in Havana, is trying to live a regular life in today's Cuba. She is engaged to her childhood friend Luis and lives with her 16-year-old niece, Liliana. Celia's life is disrupted when Luis's brother, Joe, returns from Miami flaunting his American ways. Joe's arrival and Liliana's adolescent restlessness force Celia to examine the discrepancy between her country's revolutionary ideals and its reality.

As this family drama unfolds, Celia is unnerved by moments when her mind and body seem to be taken over by Celia Sánchez, a heroine of the Revolution and long-time intimate of Fidel Castro. The turbulent past and an undefined future collide when Liliana disappears and Celia sets out into the Cuban countryside in search of her.

The Woman She Was is a deeply moving novel that explores the aspirations, hopes, and fears of contemporary Cubans, as well as the challenges they still face.

Originally a freelance journalist, Rosa Jordan has in the past 15 years published nine books: four non-fiction (two set in Cuba), four juvenile fiction (set in the US South), and Far From Botany Bay, her first novel for adults (set in England, Australia, and the South Pacific.) Whatever the form or geography, Jordan’s writings illuminate landscapes where social and political realities intersect with personal courage and compassion. Jordan grew up in the Florida Everglades, attended university in California and Mexico, and emigrated to Canada in 1980. An environmental and social justice activist, she has been on the board of Earthways Foundation almost 20 years. In that capacity, she facilitated the development of an organic agriculture project in the mountains of Guatemala and a jungle cat reserve in Ecuador’s Chocó rainforest. She and her partner Derek Choukalos live, write, ski, and cycle in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia.

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