This is how the world grows smaller: When the paths of a refugee from El Salvador, a privileged young woman from Iran, and the math genius son of a Cuban-American magician all intersect in the crossroads of America.

These are all characters in Christina Garcia’s newest novel, “A Handbook to Luck,” a deft and fascinating work that traces, in three separate narratives, three lives from 1967 to 1986.

Garcia, a former journalist whose first novel, “Dreaming in Cuban” was nominated for a National Book Award, moved to Napa last summer. Over mint tea and home-baked cookies served in her Craftsman house in Old Town, the author recently discussed her newest work, and the chance choices that create lives, in fiction and the real world.

Garcia was born in Havana in 1958, just before Fidel Castro led her island country into the revolution that severed ties with the U.S., and created a split in her own family as well. “My father’s family moved to New York, and my  mother’s family stayed in Cuba,” she said. Transplanted to New York City at the age of 3,  Garcia said she grew up, “thinking of myself as a New Yorker.” She studied at Barnard and did graduate work in international relations at Johns Hopkins before going to work as a journalist. She put in time as a copy editor at the New York Times and as a fledgling reporter in Tennessee before landing at Time magazine, eventually serving as bureau chief in Miami.

In 1982, at the age of 25, she decided to return to Cuba for the first time. It was, she said, “a life-changing experience. I don’t know who I’d be now, if I had not gone.”

Garcia spent most of her time in Cuba listening to stories from “relatives who claimed me,” although she was meeting them face to face for the first time. In particular she was captivated by stories from her maternal grandmother — stories, she said, that would have been lost if she’d made this visit a few years later when age had claimed the elder woman’s memory.

“I wasn’t thinking of writing novels,” Garcia said, but on her return to the U.S., she began drawing the stories into a book that became “Dreaming in Cuban.” She followed this first highly praised novel with “The Agüero Sisters” and “Monkey Hunting,” creating a “loose trilogy” drawn from a magical landscape of Cuba, of an island world and its exiles and inhabitants.

“Irony of ironies, I became a professional Cuban,” said Garcia, who has also edited anthologies of Cuban writings, and been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award.

“A Handbook to Luck,” represents a departure from strictly Cuban themes. “I’ve become interested in other upheavals,” Garcia said. Living in Los Angeles she said she discovered “the perfect place for everyone to converge, the quintessential city of immigrants where borders rub up against each other.”

She began hearing other stories: Her L.A. office was in a Persian neighborhood. A woman from El Salvador who helped care for Garcia’s daughter Pilar, was a natural story teller. “She’d say, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I shot my husband in the foot?’ and I’d be hearing another story,” Garcia said. 

Garcia and Pilar traveled back to El Salvador with their helper, touring the country by truck and bus. She applied for but was denied visas to visit Iran, and so she absorbed the stories from Iranian exiles in L.A., checking and rechecking with them for authenticity. She already had her trove of Cuban histories. From all these elements, she created the sagas of Leila Rezvani, daughter of an Iranian surgeon and critic of the Shah; of Marta Claros, a refugee from the slums of San Salvador and the terrors of its civil war in the 1970s; and Enrique Florit, a boy who grows up in Las Vegas overshadowed by his tragicomic but irresistible, flamboyant magician father, Papi, an exile from Cuba, whose magic show becomes the opening act for Sammy Davis Jr. and Vic Damone, even though it had accidentally executed Enrique’s mother.

Despite the political context, the story remains intensely personal tales of characters whose lives are a shaped by the turmoil of external events. The threads that unite these characters’ lives are slight, and occur entirely by chance, but carry with them that indefinable sense of magic, which Papi says “is largely a matter of making ordinary things appear extraordinary with a touch of smoke and illusion.”

Curiously, the image of birds recurs again and again in each of the disparate tales, long before the characters’ lives cross, but then birds are the quintessential migratory creatures, moving from place to place irrespective of boundaries. Linked to these birds is the most haunting story of Evaristo, Marta’s brother who runs away from a brutal home and moves into “an enormous coral tree near the Plaza Barrios,” from which he observes the world.

Garcia, who has said, “Poetry is my daily bread,” writes prose with a poet’s precision and grace. Marta, the poverty-stricken child in San Salvador, listens to a radio show “Amor Perdido,” “about a spoiled rich girl named Genovesa de Navarrae” and asks, “What does it mean when your heart dries out? … For a heart to dry out must be a terrible thing.” When a peddler tells her “it means that sometimes a woman has to learn how to pretend to love,” Marta wonders, “But how could anyone pretend that? Maybe it was like pretending you weren’t hungry when you really were.”

Wit is scattered throughout “A Handbook to Luck.” Enrique’s “eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Doerr, had shown the class a film that was supposed to fulfill their sex education requirement, but was, instead, a documentary on the mating habits of prairie chicken.” He later discovers his own experience in no way resembles that of a chicken. One of Leila’s classmates at her Swiss boarding school is “arrested for urinating against a tulip tree in the center of town. The boy, Omer Ozguc, was the son of the Turkish ambassador. Relations between the two countries were severely strained over the incident.”

“It’s a kind of handbook to life,” Garcia observed about her book. “There’s so much that’s silenced in places of trauma; so much gets lost … but these stories are still happening.”