The Cuban Prospect

From the author of Aftermath: “A nervy debut . . . A Heart of Darkness set deep in the bowels of the major-league farm system” (Chicago Tribune).
With compassionate intensity and great heart, Brian Shawver, in his powerful debut novel, tells the story of Dennis Birch, a thirty-four-year old failed major league ball player turned minor league scout whose field of dreams has always been baseball. No longer a candidate for baseball greatness himself—if he ever was—Dennis accepts the challenge of smuggling a hot right-handed pitcher out of Cuba in the hope that promoting the greatness of another will somehow confer a small, manageable portion of it on himself. Birch’s innocent belief in the rightness of his mission blinds him to some of the realities of it, and what seems at first to be a straight road to glory and his name on a plaque in Cooperstown, leads him into dangerous, sordid, and morally complex waters. As becomes excruciatingly clear, Fidel Castro’s Cuba is much further from the Florida Keys than the miles marked on a map.
“Deeply felt and compelling . . . informed with a moral passion not so often found today. The game of baseball is convincingly used as the background for games of a more terrible kind.” —Barry Unsworth
“First-novelist Shawver writes with sad passion about small lives swirling aimlessly in search of external verification when perhaps an inward glance is all that’s needed.” —Booklist
“This likable first effort is sure to find fans among readers of baseball novels, if not a wider audience.” —Publishers Weekly