Late in Cristina García’s first novel, a key character, haunted by family and romantic strife, wades into the ocean, abandoning herself to the current. Celia del Pino, the 71-year-old protagonist of “Dreaming in Cuban,” has no intention of swimming back to shore.

More than once in the 31 years since the book’s publication, García, who lives in Greenbrae (Marin County), has been gently interrogated by readers who want to know more about its ambiguous ending. Did Celia commit suicide? Answering that question in print “was the last thing I expected to do,” García told The Chronicle.

But her expectations have been upended. Inspired in part by Berkeley’s Central Works theater company’s staging of “Dreaming in Cuban,” a 1992 National Book Award finalist that is often read in schools, García has now penned a sequel, returning to the characters that helped establish her as one of the country’s most respected storytellers.

“Vanishing Maps,” her eighth novel, takes place in 1999, two decades after the dramatic conclusion of “Dreaming in Cuban.” Celia is still with us — “she floated to shore like a sodden log of driftwood,” García writes in the new book — as are several of the characters introduced in her debut.

Celia’s eclectic family includes her daughter Lourdes, an anti-Castro leader in Miami’s Cuban American community, and adult grandchildren Ivanito, a drag artist in Berlin; Irina, a lingerie tycoon in post-Soviet Moscow; and Pilar, a visual artist in Los Angeles. Then there’s Pilar’s 6-year-old son Azul, who, like his uncle Ivanito, has “a gift for the otherworldly” — both are visited by the ghost of Felicia, Ivanito’s late mother.

In “Vanishing Maps,” Celia, a vigorous nonagenarian, spends much of the book wondering how she should respond to a long-ago lover’s letters suggesting a reunion. Meanwhile, her grandchildren — “scattered to the wind like rootless plants,” as Celia sees it — assemble elsewhere for an improvised get-together that proves to be eventful, funny and poignant.

Setting the book in the 1990s, García said, is an effort “to get a sense of the fallout from all the cataclysmic changes that ensued after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the repercussions in Cuba and the Eastern Bloc,” both of which underwent massive changes after the Soviet government collapsed in 1991.

That backdrop also enables García to introduce an inspired-by-actual-events storyline about a controversy within the Cuban diaspora, a rich thread based on the real-life 1999 battle over a Cuban boy named Elián González.

Plus, the ’90s timeline keeps Celia in the mix, which fans like Oakland-based author Carolina De Robertis appreciate.

“Celia is a looming and tremendous character,” De Robertis, author of “The President and the Frog,” said, adding that García’s “Dreaming in Cuban” is an “incredibly groundbreaking” novel.

“It shattered glass ceilings for Latina women writers in the United States,” she said. “It forged new landscapes of possibility, and generations of Latina women have been positively impacted by the ground that Cristina broke.”

A circuitous route led García back to the “Dreaming in Cuban” cast.

In 2015, Adrian Alea, a young New Yorker beginning a theater career, emailed García to suggest a theatrical version of “Dreaming in Cuban.” Alea recalled recently how thrilled he was when she replied within hours.

García, Alea told The Chronicle, is “a novelist that I just had on a pedestal — her language, the way she works with all the senses, her complex characters,” as well as her facility for telling “stories across generations and specific political time periods.”

With what she described as Alea’s “instrumental, crucial” help, García adapted it for the stage, premiering the play in 2022 at Central Works. (She’s since written several stage scripts and is now adapting De Robertis’ “The President and the Frog.”)

Rereading “Dreaming in Cuban” while writing her adaptation, García found herself wondering what became of Celia. “I was suddenly accosted by the possibilities” for a follow-up, she said, laughing.

Like “Dreaming in Cuban,” De Robertis said, “Vanishing Maps” showcases García’s talent for crafting characters who are “incredibly vivid, fully formed, fascinating human beings in their own right, but also speak so deeply to the divisive and sticky and complicated nature of diaspora in a politically fraught community and cultural identity, which is important to so many of us Latin Americans and immigrants who come from countries where political upheaval has impacted people and families through generations.”

Revisiting Celia’s family also gave García another chance to write about Pilar, who the author admitted is “a little bit of an alter ego for me.”

深情的,忧郁的,用单一的年检her, Pilar considers herself “a failed artist.” But her promising experiments withkintsugi, a Japanese art involving the repair and redecoration of broken pottery and other objects, are an apt metaphor for her diffuse, resilient family.

Several “interludes” in the book focus on photos taken during important moments in Pilar’s life, such as her USA-bound family’s departure from Cuba, tense family gatherings in the States, and Pilar and Ivanito hanging out at a Manhattan punk club. Popping up periodically in the narrative, Pilar’s first-person reflections on these events evoke the structure of “Dreaming in Cuban,” in which Celia’s letters are used to similar effect.

“Vanishing Maps” includes a photo said to be of Pilar at 14, confidently staring into the lens for what García describes as “a re-entry permit issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1973.” But the author revealed that the real girl in the picture is of herself, a Cuban-born immigrant who, like Pilar, came to the United States as a child.

According to the permit, Pilar would be turned away from the U.S. if she’d recently visited Cuba, Korea or Vietnam. “Talk about a Cold War relic,” Pilar mused.

Later in the novel, another family member returns to similar thematic territory, saying, “It’s delusional to think we can nail down the past.” García’s characters know this as well as anyone.

Kevin Canfield is a freelance writer.