“Everywhere you turn in Adios, Happy Homeland! you find a beautiful meld of tradition and modernism, an admirable mastery of irony, and a lyrical deposition on exile and homecoming. Take this balloon ride across the Carib-Cubano-Americano sea and landscape and you will relish the view.”
“Think Casablanca... The Last War is a seductive meditation on 'The end of desire. The terrible violence at the end of love.'” —O Magazine
“An exquisitely crafted work . . . Novelists and journalists each have a different eye for detail, and Menéndez plants a foot firmly in each camp, to rich result. . . . The result is a novel, lyrically written, that feels strikingly real and heartfelt, a narrative by a woman destroying herself with imagination and doubt.” —Denver Post
“Menéndez’s descriptions of the city are haunting and shadowy. . . . A precise and subtle book, full of finely realized flashbacks, the narrator’s memories of a marriage and detailed descriptions of Istanbul and of the experience of adjusting to another home, another culture.” —Miami Herald
“Evoke[s] the macabre merry-go-round of reporters who have whirled in and out of Iraq. . . . A character study of those who have found their purpose in bearing witness to bloodshed.” —New York Times Book Review
“[A] potent literary novel . . . A deft portrait of an estranged couple whose pain is veiled by the fog of war.” —People
“[An] impressionistic and introspective tale . . . Menéndez offers astute and perceptive commentary on both the hidden and obvious effects of war and its aftermath.” —Booklist
“Menéndez shows that 'the exile experience' is not a function of ethnicity or nationality, but of choices – often bad choices – and our perverse but entirely human need to hold onto the ugliness of our pasts.” —The Rumpus
“Poetic, atmospheric, and introspective . . . A quietly piercing cultural and philosophical think-piece, comparable in its low-key, allusive moodiness to a European art-house movie.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Menéndez shows with unblinking honesty in her self-assured second novel The Last War how in conflict and its aftermath journalists can find or lose themselves. . . . Menéndez’s deep wisdom about people and their relationships is the payoff that always makes this insightful author worth reading.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Menéndez is a skilled novelist – even admirers of her acclaimed short story collection, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd or her earlier novel, Loving Che, will be impressed with the deepening maturity of her writing. . . . [A] fully convincing psychological portrait.” —South Florida Sun Sentinel
“There are those who fight wars on the frontlines and those who fight them on the distant home front. Ana Menéndez’s The Last War offers us a moving and probing portrait of both types of lovers and media warriors in this poignant and touching novel of crumbling friendships and marriages – betrayals, large and small – in a dicey and dangerous world.” —Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Brother, I’m Dying