The Man Who Loved Dogs

The Man who Loved Dogs is a novel by Leonardo Padura and involves the complex political narratives that surround the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramon Mercader.

Padura’s novel traces the saga of Trotsky’s 11-year flight from Stalin; the recruitment and creation of an assassin in the form of Catalan communist Ramón Mercader; and the marginalization of Iván Cárdenas Maturell, a Cuban novelist who learns early in his career the hazards of writing in his homeland.

[citation needed] 'The Cuban writer Leonardo Padura has made his entrance to the Latin American Modernist canon by writing a Russian novel.

The three alternating stories resonate with one another, acquiring deeper meaning as they paint the complete fresco of a political paradigm’s downfall.'

[It] is an exhaustively reported work, chockablock with history - from the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism and Stalin's show trials to the steely suffocation of post-Castro Cuba.'