The Man Who Loved Dogs

Leonardo Padura's novel retells the killing of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader through three intertwined stories. One follows Trotsky's eleven years in flight from Stalin, another the recruitment and shaping of Mercader, a Catalan communist, into an assassin. The third belongs to Iván Cárdenas Maturell, once a great hope of Cuban literature until a story judged counterrevolutionary sidelined him, who now works as a proofreader at a veterinary magazine in Havana. Iván meets a mysterious foreigner walking two Russian wolfhounds, the man who loved dogs. In Spain it reached the final round of the Book of the Year Award.

A What CEOs are reading feature named Itaú Unibanco chief executive Roberto Setubal as a reader of it.