The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man's land. Some of them want to leave and can't, others do leave but never quite get anywhere. In this multivoiced novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Alvarez brings together the stories of many people from all walks of life through a series of interconnected daisy chains. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, roaring in Yankee Stadium, lost in the Louvre, intensely competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a junket for emigre dissidents in Berlin, these characters learn that while they may seem to be on the move, in reality they are paralyzed, immersed in a fake war waged with little real passion.