Debra Spark

On the doorstep of a bakery on a blue street in Puerto Rico, Maria Elena faints. Revived by sweet morsels of wedding cake, she falls headlong into the lives of Sandrofo Cordero Lucero and his identical triplet daughters. Sandrofo came to the island from America ten years before to start a new life. A widower, he has not taken a lover since, and Maria Elena resolves to find out why. But her questions to Sandrofo are met with silence, and her insatiable curiosity about his past threatens the family’s elaborately constructed identity. In Coconuts for the Saint, Debra Spark has written an enchanting, astonishingly beautiful novel about memory, love, the mysteries of fate, and the very nature of self.

“Eloquent and enchanting... a delightful novel... reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. Spark has combined an acute sense of place with a suspenseful plot... and with characters that are emotionally believable and realistic.”
“A gorgeous novel... as richly imaginative, wildly sensual and wisely unsettling as they come. Real world magic.”
“Debra Spark’s first novel reveals a Proustian longing for what was. Spark’s Puerto Rico is an island of lost loves, of romantic hopes, and of secrets withheld--all of which beckon like a tray of sweets behind the bakery window.”
“Debra Spark is an extremely intelligent and imaginative writer. Her long-awaited first novel is graceful and ambitious--storytelling at its best.”
“Debra Spark writes like some pixilated offspring of a secret liaison between J.D. Salinger and Isabel Allende. Coconuts for the Saint is an elixir constituted of equal parts grace, wild humor, exquisite tenderness, and ferocious heart. One taste is sufficient to leave the head reeling from its chorus of voice, the mind wide-open and convinced of miracles.”
“An excellent debut novel that examines the nature of love, the power of family and the inexorable pull of the past... Spark uses her intricate, multilayered structure to deliver a myriad of entertaining scenes and marvelous insights.”