“We are finally free, but at the very moment when the gates swing open and we can fly out of the cage, Aunt Carmen’s love revives our old longing for our homeland.” The lives of the four Garcia sisters are thrown into disarray when the family is forced to leave their luxurious home in the Dominican Republic due to their father's involvement in an attempted coup. In wonderful, but not always hospitable New York, parents stick to their old habits, while Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofia try to build a new life: straightening their hair, dressing like an American and gradually forgetting their native Spanish language. In Julia Alvarez's award-winning cult novel, the sisters tell their stories of being at home—and away from home—in America for thirty years. From the author When I was ten years old, we emigrated to New York. How amazing is a country where everyone speaks English! These people must be smarter, I thought. Maids, waiters, taxi drivers, doormen, street bums, garbage men - they all spoke this complex language. It took me a while to understand that Americans are not necessarily a superior nation, superior in intelligence. It was as natural for them to learn their mother’s language as it was for Dominican babies to learn Spanish. My mother explained that they absorb it through their mother's milk, and for a while I thought that mother's tongue is called mother's tongue because we get it from our mother's breast along with nutrients and vitamins. Soon it didn’t seem so strange that everyone spoke English and not Spanish. I learned to hear this language not as English, but as meaning. I no longer tried to understand, I understood. I became comfortable with this second language. Who is this book for? For everyone who loves strong stories with meaning. For fans of Latin American literature. Published in Russian for the first time.