Every now and then a book gets lodged in your mind partially because its protagonist is so irritating. Think Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara, for instance. In Wendy Guerra’s Revolution Sunday the author gives us self-obsessed poet Cleopatra Perdiguer (Cleo to her friends, of which she has few), who hates her home city of Havana even more than she loves it. Granted, Cleo has strong reasons for being so unlikable. Since her early childhood, she has been under close scrutiny by the current Cuban regime, so much so that one government spy is looked upon as a member of the family. Now Cleo has won a major literary prize, and her rising fame has intensified the scrutiny she’s under. All this has the effect of heightening her already-present paranoia, but nonetheless she continues her attempt to lead as normal a life as possible for a spied-upon, self-obsessed poet. Then one day Oscar-winning American actor Gerónimo Martines approaches Cleo for help with a film he’s making about her dead father, in which he will perform the starring role. Lonely and frustrated, Cleo falls for him, only to be shocked by the amount of information Gerónimo has already collected about her family. The information includes her own birth certificate, which hints that her adored father might not be her biological father. There are spies galore in this intense, intricate book, some of them possibly imaginary. Cleo is aware she has passed the tipping point of paranoia, but she can’t help herself. Her constant vigilance does not make for a relaxed frame of mind, and at one point—after spending almost a year in bed—she muses, “Most Cuban women take diazepam, nitrazepam, meprobamate because life is too hard to go through it with a clear mind.” Yet she continues to write the type of political poetry which is certain to draw the Cuban authorities to her. Because of Cleo’s determination to continue telling the truth in her poems, by the end of the book her self-obsession has morphed into something resembling gallantry.