Empress Of The Splendid Season

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" returns with a beautiful, mesmerizing novel of love, passion and loss--witnessed through the experience of a formerly prosperous Cuban emigre who is now a cleaning woman on New York's Upper West Side.

Oscar Hijuelos vividly brings to life the joys, desires, and disappointment of American life witnessed through the experience of a formerly prosperous Cuban emigre named Lydia Espana--now a cleaning woman in New York. In magnetic prose, he juxtaposes Lydia's tale with the stories of her clients, contrasting her experiences with the secret lives of those for whom she works. No one writes better of love or the pulse of a city, nor has any writer better captured the complexity inherent in the emigration experience; how assimilation is at once the achievement of dreams, yet also a loss of the past. "Empress of the Splendid Season" is Hijuelos at his masterful best, a novel filled with incantatory, rhythmic prose and rich in heartfelt vision.