Prima Hermana

Two girls arrive in Nebraska with nothing that matches - not their ages, not their surnames, not even, at first, their claim on each other.

Esther has been raised by Ofelia since she was five, in a Havana apartment where love came stitched into hemlines and folded into bread. Lourdes barely knows her at all. But when Operation Pedro Pan sends them both north, alone, into the care of strangers, the two of them build something neither girl was given by blood: a sisterhood invented out of necessity, then chosen, then defended, one hard year at a time - through diner shifts at a dollar fifty an hour, a one-room apartment above a stranger's garage, and the particular loneliness of being a child no government form quite knows how to name.

Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.

Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.

He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.

These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.