For many the idea of living off the land is a romantic notion left to stories of olden days or wistful dreams at the office. But for Sara Loewen it becomes her way of life each summer as her family settles into their remote cabin on Uyak Bay for the height of salmon season. With this connection to thousands of years of fishing and gathering at its core, Gaining Daylight explores what it means to balance lives on two islands, living within both an ancient way of life and the modern world. Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of living at the northern edge of the Pacific.

Loewen’s writing is richly descriptive; readers can almost feel heat from wood stoves, smell smoking salmon, and spot the ways the ocean blues change with the season. With honesty and humor, Loewen easily draws readers into her world, sharing the rewards of subsistence living and the peace brought by miles of crisp solitude. 

A native Cuban who has lived in London since 1966, Guillermo Cabrera Infante is, in every sense, a multilingual and multicultural author. Equally at ease in both Spanish and English, he has distinguished himself with daring and innovative novels, essays, short stories, and film scripts written in both languages. His work has won major literary awards in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as a Guggenheim fellowship in the United States.

This biography is the first comprehensive exploration of the life and works of Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with the author and his family and friends, as well as extensive study of both published and unpublished works, Raymond D. Souza creates an intimate portrait of Cabrera Infante and the cultural and political milieus that shaped his writing, including Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres), View of Dawn in the Tropics (Vista del amanecer en el trópico), Infante's Inferno (La Habana para un Infante difunto), Holy Smoke, A Twentieth Century Job (Un oficio del siglo XX), Writes of Passage (Así en la paz como en la guerra), and Mea Cuba.