She remembered when Hemingway had planted a banyan tree at his house and told her its parasitic roots were like human desire. At the time shed thought it romantic. She hadnt understood his warning. In Depression-era Key West, Mariella Bennet, the daughter of an American fisherman and a Cuban woman, knows hunger. Her struggle to support her family following her fathers death leads her to a bar and bordello, where she bets on a risky boxing match . . . and attracts the interest of two men world-famous writer Ernest Hemingway, and Gavin Murray, one of the World War I veterans who are laboring to build the Overseas Highway. When Mariella is hired as a maid by Hemingways second wife, Pauline, she enters a rarified world of lavish, celebrity-filled dinner parties and elaborate off-island excursions.
