Keeper of My Kin
Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter
Will be published approx. on 2. July 2026
Book
Hardback
384 pages
978-1-6680-2565-9 (ISBN)
Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History comes a heartbreaking yet redemptive memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.
In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer's mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became.
In this beautiful memoir, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into the past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present. We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada's departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada's parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind-Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan Jose, both of whose lives were marked irrevocably by revolution and family separation. Moving between Cuba and the United States and then back again, the book unpacks the experience and emotion of migration, in the moment of separation and over the long-term, for those who left and those who stayed.
Using a treasure trove of letters written across the gulf of family separation and found after the death of Ada's parents, as well as government documents acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests, Ferrer offers us a profound reflection on belonging, memory, and the lasting imprint of history.
In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer's mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became.
In this beautiful memoir, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into the past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present. We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada's departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada's parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind-Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan Jose, both of whose lives were marked irrevocably by revolution and family separation. Moving between Cuba and the United States and then back again, the book unpacks the experience and emotion of migration, in the moment of separation and over the long-term, for those who left and those who stayed.
Using a treasure trove of letters written across the gulf of family separation and found after the death of Ada's parents, as well as government documents acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests, Ferrer offers us a profound reflection on belonging, memory, and the lasting imprint of history.
Reviews / Votes
"Stirring . . . Ferrer's narrative offers a human warmth in the form of jokes and jolts of emotion couched in rich historical context . . . She approaches the mountains of journals, letters and documents left behind by her parents with the same rigor she applies to files in Cuba's national archives." -The New York Times Book Review"Intimate . . . Ferrer is the ideal keeper of her kin's stories." -The Atlantic
"[A] heartfelt memoir of love and separation . . . With profound empathy, Ferrer illuminates the loving bonds between her parents and their children and her complex relationship with the island country that became the center of her scholarship and her identity." -Oprah Daily
"Timely . . . as unsparing as it is tender." -Los Angeles Times "Ada Ferrer's Keeper of My Kin is a brilliant testament to the power of storytelling. A devastatingly human portrayal of the effects of migration, family secrets, and the history that binds and moves us, this book is a must-read for anyone who has ever loved. With enormous tenderness and an unflinching pursuit of truth, Ferrer writes her family into history, into memoir, into public record, into sunlight, where they-where we all-have always deserved to be." -Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito "Powerful and eloquent, Keeper of My Kin explores love of family and love of place-and, for those who are forced to flee, what is left behind and what stays with them forever." -Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle "[Ferrer] braids a clear-eyed account of recent Cuban history with an empathetic catalog of its effects on her family. It's a memorable and heartrending achievement." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Magnificent . . . remarkable . . . Keeper of My Kin is full and resonant and simply superb." -Bookpage (starred review)
"A poignant tribute to the bonds of familial love across history, geography, and political and personal challenges." -Shelf Awareness "A gripping family memoir, Keeper of My Kin explores fraught relationships and secret pasts against the backdrop of big history. Here, Ada Ferrer, the 'historian daughter' and descendant of an enslaved Black maternal ancestor, tells the truths of her kin with an aching tenderness, revealing the traumas that come with the package of racism, war, revolution, and migration. In an intimate story lovingly told, memory, history, and emotional honesty combine in a beautiful act of retrieval." -Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake "Ada Ferrer's remarkable Keeper of My Kin is one of those memoirs you don't just read, but one that you feel in your bones. It's both a fearless excavation of the past and a bold, compassionate attempt to understand the difficult choices embedded, sometimes buried, within every immigration story. I loved this book." -Daniel Alarcon, executive producer of Radio Ambulante and author of The King Is Always Above His People "Love is everywhere in this book: the deep romantic bond between her parents, the author's intense attachment to both of them and to other relatives, and to the troubled island country she lived in for only ten months, yet became the center of her scholarship, her thinking, and her identity. As heartbreaking as this story often is, it is equally heartwarming, filled with love of all kinds." -Kirkus (starred review) "Keeper of My Kin is an engrossing tale of what it takes to make and keep a family across generations, even in the face of political turmoil and impossible choices. Ada Ferrer is a deeply moving truth-teller who, in recovering the lives of her kin, rediscovers herself. On her bold and beautiful pages, we learn that migration has never been a story of politics and power alone. At its core, it is a saga about family love. A new window onto our own moment, this book is a gift to a nation striving to better understand the stakes of every stop, detention, and expulsion carried out today. It is a balm and brave call to conscience." -Martha S. Jones, author of The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir "The Ferrer family will forever stay with you for theirs is the story of all Cubans in the last seven decades. If you read this tender and brilliant book as I did-drying tears and holding my breath-it'll be yours to cherish as well. A triumphant memoir of love and loss." -Mirta Ojito, author of Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and the USA Today bestselling novel Deeper than the Ocean "'What country, friends, is this?' asks Viola, washed ashore in Illyria at the beginning of Twelfth Night. Here, another island, Cuba, and the shores of America; another wine-dark, enclosed, estranging sea; other odysseys. Ferrer has written a history that is also myth: of those left behind, lost brothers, found families, old and new lives. Keeper of My Kin is exhilarating to read; I loved it; I loved knowing more about all the departures and returns, the losses and reparations, that have made the modern world." -Carolyn Steedman, author of Landscape for a Good Woman
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Simon & Schuster
Illustrations
40-50 b&w photos throughout
Dimensions
Height: 233 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 39 mm
Weight
546 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-6680-2565-9 (9781668025659)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2026
Scribner
€14.83
Available for download
Person
Ada Ferrer is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. From 1995 to 2024, she taught at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of Cuba: An American History, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history, and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Her earlier books, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 and Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution won multiple prizes, among them the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, three prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history. Ferrer has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Social Science Research Council, among many others. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, Ferrer has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.