Three generations of personal secrets float steadily beneath the surface in Eleni Gage’s newest novel, The Ladies of Mangua. Isabela’s husband, Ninexin’s father, and Mariana’s grandfather has passed away, and they’ve all returned to Managua to pay their respects. Still, each character has their own cross to bear, and the difficulties and complexities of having meaningful relationships with family are skillfully portrayed.

The inspiration for this complex story came when Gage first began dating her Nicaraguan husband. He had received a phone call from his grandmother who attended a convent school in New Orleans – she had gotten a phone call from a Cuban she had dated while living there. “Emilio mentioned that it was quite common for Nicaraguan women of his grandmother’s era to go to convent school in the US. I was caught up in the ill-fated romance with the Cuban, of course, but it was when I realized that this same generation of convent school girls turned society ladies were the mothers of the young people who led the Revolution and fought the war in Nicaragua that I realized there was a book there,” Gage tells Ethical Traveler. She continues to say that not one of the characters could be fully realized without the perspective of the others.

Gage switches perspective with each chapter from Isabela to Ninexin to Mariana, yet still manages to weave the same tale with a stronger sense of cohesiveness. Isabela is Ninexin’s mother and Mariana’s grandmother, who went to a convent school in New Orleans. It is here that she meets her Cuban love, and the reader learns of their love affair that ended abruptly and traumatically. Ninexin is a leader of the Sandinista party who played an integral part within the Nicaraguan Revolution. She stayed in Nicaragua to help rebuild the country and gave her daughter, Mariana, to Isabela to take to Miami for safety.

Even though being in Nicaragua gave a lot of needed insight, much of the research came from reading, “particularly to understand what it was like to be a woman in the Sandinista movement.” She details the books she read to create a very real history to Ninexin. “Margaret Randall’s oral histories, Sandino’s Daughters and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited were very useful, and so was everything written by the Nicaraguan poet, memoirist, and novelist Giocona Belli,” Gage recounts.

The depiction of Mariana’s bitterness and anger towards her mother for choosing to rebuild a country over being a mother. She is spiteful, but self-aware enough to know she shouldn’t be. Ninexin is wracked with guilt over her decision to leave Mariana in the safety of her parents’ home in Miami. Their relationship is rocky, even from the beginning of the novel. As the reader discovers more about each character and the things they’ve hidden from others, they become more relatable and human.

These relationships are given colorful backdrop. Gage is able to describe the family’s history with vivid descriptions of the land. Gage was able to live in the town of Granada for seven months while her husband was there for work, and it was here that she could create a picture of “the lake and the central square and the houses and churches painted the colors of tropical fruit.” She even visited the archipelago of Solentiname, which is the location of a pivotal moment in the book, a place that serves as a home for healing a difficult relationship.

With the recent publication of The Ladies of Managua, Gage remains busy with her full-time job working as a magazine editor and being a mother of two. She looks to the future and plans on writing another novel, but this one will be set on the Ionian islands, with part of it set after World War II. “Unfortunately, writing The Ladies of Managua while living in Granada spoiled me—if you can live in the setting of your novel while writing it, that’s the way to do it! I don’t know if I’ll ever have that amazing experience again, but a girl can dream!”

The Ladies of Managua
St. Martin’s Press (May 5, 2015)
400 pp. Hardcover, $26.99