Interweaving Timelines: Chanel Cleeton’s The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes
WRITTEN BY MARLIE PARKER WASSERMAN
In The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes (Berkley, 2025), Chanel Cleeton excels at trios. She transports her readers to the points of view of three women, to three settings, and to three periods of time. In Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1900, Eva Fuentes arrives from Cuba to study at Harvard for a summer. In London in 2024, Margo Reynolds works for a client seeking a lost book written by a Cuban woman. In Havana in 1966, Pilar Castillo fends off Fidel Castro’s vicious henchmen. We know early in the book that all three plots connect to a book that Eva Fuentes writes, but Cleeton unfolds the details of those connections with surprises, skill, and excellent pacing.
Cleeton’s readers will be familiar with her ability to juggle multiple timelines and multiple points of view. Most notably, she uses two timelines in Next Year in Havana and The House on Biscayne Bay, three interconnected stories in The Last Train to Key West and The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, and two interconnected stories in The Cuban Heiress.
I have heard many authors of admirable dual timeline novels say they would never tackle such a challenge again. Not Cleeton, who favors those structures, successfully masking their underlying complexity from her readers. I asked Cleeton how she manages this feat. “One of my favorite parts of writing historical fiction,” she explains, “is the chance to weave together multiple timelines and POVs [points of view] because it’s fascinating to see how the past shapes the present and to highlight the connections between them. In writing The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes, I wanted to illustrate the impact that a book could have across centuries and continents; utilizing multiple timelines brought that to the forefront.”
Cleeton acknowledges that her first draft often needs work. She says she may need some distance to get it right. “While employing multiple timelines does offer a lot of storytelling possibilities, it can often feel as though you’re working with a Rubik’s Cube in terms of the shifting of scenes/POVs that occurs before you feel like you get it ‘just right.’ One of the biggest challenges is putting each POV/timeline together so they fit like puzzle pieces. I typically don’t make those changes while I’m drafting, but they will come later during the revision process as I’m reading through the novel with fresh eyes, and also during the editorial process, when I share the book with my editor and we go back and forth on developmental rounds.”
Many readers avoid dual timeline novels because they find themselves immersed in one story and bored by the other. I think most readers will find that all sections of The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes work well. I do have my favorite—Pilar’s chapters in Cuba when her husband has been detained by Fidel’s men and is likely dead. But the two other sections also hold my attention.
Cleeton shines a light on how she manages to take care with each of the stories within a novel. “I’m always conscientious of the fact that not only should each POV enhance the others, but they should also be able to stand alone as their own independent storylines. You want them to complement each other but not necessarily rely on each other so much that if you stripped away one of the POVs, the others would not have enough support to represent a full story arc. A lot of this comes down to trial and error, and that’s where the Rubik’s Cube comes in—it’s a lot of rearranging and shifting until you’re pleased with the finished product. It’s definitely something that gets easier with practice and time—all of my historical novels have either multiple POVs or multiple timelines, so it’s something I have grown more comfortable with as I’ve written each novel. In fact, I often will try to think of new ways to keep it fresh with each book so I’m changing things up a bit. I always draft in Scrivener, and I find the ability to easily move scenes around to be so helpful when I’m deciding on the novel’s order. I don’t write each POV separately as I find that they are so interconnected in the tapestry that they form within the story that often the events in one timeline/POV inform what happens when I switch to the next timeline/POV.”
Although readers who have finished Cleeton’s previous novels on Cuba will have a sense of the history of that country and its relations with the U.S., her new readers may need more background. Cleeton provides it, mostly layering in history as her stories move along, and sometimes providing longer passages. She explains how she weighs what to include and what to exclude. “This question of how much history to incorporate in a historical novel is often at the crux of what we do writing historical fiction. I have several guidelines I typically use—is the history central to the plot? Is there a historical fact that readers will need to know in order to understand the characters’ actions and motivations or to have broader context in terms of the novel’s setting? And is there a piece of history that is germane to the novel that I—and hopefully, by extension my readers—find interesting or was previously unknown to me? I often follow the axiom that if history inspires curiosity or interest in me as a writer then it will hold a similar appeal to my readers, and so far I have been fortunate that it holds true. As I go through revisions and edits, I’ll often look at the historical details I’ve incorporated with a more discerning eye, cutting in places where I have repetition or have perhaps gone into too much detail or augmenting spots where I need more explanation.”
Chanel Cleeton writes engaging novels, and equally important for those of us who love historical fiction, she thinks about the craft and generously shares her wisdom.
About the contributor: Marlie Parker Wasserman writes historical crime fiction, set between 1890 and 1930. Her next novel, First Daughter (February, 2026), imagines a summer of threats targeting Grover Cleveland’s oldest child.
Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 114 (November 2025)
