Combining the intellectual sophistication and luminous prose of Nabokov with the worldview of a scion of Castro's Cuba, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire is a novel of immense power and originality from one of the most exciting new talents in Latin America. J. ("the most hilariously wounded and obsessive narrator since Pale Fire's Charles Kinbote."—Francisco Goldman) lives on the fringes of Eastern Europe, a smuggler fencing the flotsam of communism's collapse. Offered a commission to illegally trap a rare Russian butterfly, he decides to use it as an opportunity to smuggle V., his Russian lover who has no papers, back into her homeland. In the port of Odessa, she disappears. J. continues alone to a small village on the Black Sea, where he waits, reading her letters, hoping to find both the butterfly and the way to lure V. back into his life. Equal parts bittersweet love story, international intrigue, and one man's quest to write the perfect love letter, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire hails the arrival of a writer of international stature.