LOST INNOCENCES: The Pact, by Tony Haber-Matos

LOST INNOCENCES: The Pact is the debut novel by Tony Haber-Matos, set in contemporary Havana. At the Colegio San Jerónimo, three students, Pedro Martínez Pérez, Rafael and Juan, face the university entrance examination that will decide their futures, and fear makes them customers. They pay Eulogio, an unlicensed spiritual practitioner, five hundred dollars each for the examination answers, and Pedro pays his share with his mother's stolen jewelry, letting the family's housekeeper, Yadira, take the blame. Behind Eulogio stands something older and colder, the Northstar Continuity Review, a foundation network built over twelve years to classify children as reliable, uncertain or dangerous, and to convert every act of help into debt, referrals, silence, signatures and other people's names. Journalist Lucía Valdés begins to pull the thread. The boys' crime is real, and the novel never excuses it. Its question is what a society becomes when help itself is the instrument of control, and who gets to decide who deserves it.


Published by Oreate-Casa Santiago Press in seven languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Japanese, and Portuguese.


Buy on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHXVHXHS and Walmart https://www.walmart.com/ip/Inocencia-Perdida-El-Pacto-Paperback/20996368906 and Barnes and Noble.


Website https://tonyhabermatos.wordpress.com YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@tonyhabermatos Instagram @tonyhaberofficial LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-haber/ TikTok @tonyhaber1 Email jantoniohaber@gmail.com Phone 305-497-8620 Oreate-Casa Santiago Miami, Florida 33014 No office hours.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lost Innocences: The Pact — a debut novel in seven languages

Some silences last for generations. Every family has a door it does not open, and my first novel is about what happens when that door finally opens, and what it costs the people standing on both sides of it. I am Tony Haber-Matos, a Miami-based author, and Lost Innocences: The Pact is my debut novel, Part I of the Lost Innocence saga, published by OreatePress in 2026. In contemporary Havana, three schoolboys pay a spiritual practitioner for stolen examination answers and uncover a foundation network that classifies children and converts help into obedience. The novel launched simultaneously in seven languages, English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Japanese, and Portuguese, because a story about the silences families carry does not belong to one country. It belongs to every reader who has carried a secret that was never theirs to carry. The book is available now at Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHXVHXHS), Walmart (https://www.walmart.com/ip/Inocencia-Perdida-El-Pacto-Paperbac...
Read more

The Courage to Tell a Family Story Honestly

What stayed with me after I finished reading Lost Innocences: The Pact was not a single twist, it was the quiet question underneath the story, what it costs to tell the truth plainly when softening it would be kinder to everyone in the room. I kept thinking about the families I know who tell their stories in fragments, a name mentioned and then dropped, a place described in detail and then never mentioned again, and how the gaps in those stories can feel heavier than the parts spoken aloud. Reading this book made me listen more carefully to those silences, not to fill them with invention, but to notice what they protect and what they cost. The novel is set in contemporary Havana, at the Colegio San Jerónimo, where Pedro Martínez Pérez and his friends Rafael and Juan face the university entrance examination that will decide their futures. Fear turns them into customers, and they pay Eulogio, an unlicensed spiritual practitioner, five hundred dollars each for the examination answers, wi...
Read more

The Promise We Keep Quiet: How Silence Shapes a Family, and a Thriller

What stayed with me after reading Lost Innocence: The Pact was not a single twist, it was the quiet. I kept thinking about the way a family can agree to stay silent without ever saying so out loud, and how that silence, kept at first out of love, slowly starts to decide things for them. The story is set in contemporary Havana, where three schoolboys, Pedro Martínez Pérez, Rafael and Juan, face the university entrance examination that will decide their futures, and fear turns them into customers for stolen answers. I found myself less interested in whether they would get caught than in what their choice set in motion, because behind the man who sold them the answers stands the Northstar Continuity Review, a network that has spent twelve years turning help into a system for sorting children, and the boys only begin to see it when it is already around them. What made me keep reading was the price of that silence, paid in small installments rather than all at once. Pedro pays his share wit...
Read more