桑德拉•希斯內羅絲（Sandra Cisneros），1954年齣生於芝加哥，因詩歌和小說創作而贏得國際聲譽。她曾獲得過很多奬項，包括“蘭南文學奬”（the Lannan Literary Award）和“美國圖書奬”（the American Book Award），她還是“國傢藝術捐助基金”（the National Endowment for the Arts）和“麥剋阿瑟基金”（the MacArthur Foundation）的受資助作傢。希斯內羅絲著作頗豐，包括短篇小說集《喊女溪及其他》（Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories），《芒果街上的小屋》（The House on Mango Street），詩集《浪蕩女》（Loose Woman）、《不擇手段》（My Wicked Wicked Ways），以及兒童讀物《頭發》（Hairs / Pelitos）。希斯內羅絲現居美國得剋薩斯州的聖安東尼奧。

The celebrated author of The House on Mango Street gives us an extraordinary new novel, told in language of blazing originality: a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy–the very stuff of life.

Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. The striped caramelo rebozo is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip–a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels–from Chicago to “the other side”: Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. We travel from the Mexico City that was the “Paris of the New World” to the music-filled streets of Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties–and, finally, to Lala’s own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas.

Caramelo is a romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our country’s most beloved storytellers.