(35th Anniversary Edition)
The child of Cuban immigrants, Oscar Hijuelos (1951–2013) was an American-born novelist and the first Hispanic writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1990). He also won the Rome Prize (1985) and The Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature (2000). His eight novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.
Pablo Medina is the author of the novel The Return of Felix Nogara and the memoir Exiled Memories (both Persea), and the novels The Cigar Roller, Cubop City Blues, among others.
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A 35th anniversary edition of the acclaimed debut novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. With a new Foreword by Pablo Medina.
Set in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, this is the coming-of-age story of Hector Santinio, the American-born son of Cuban immigrants, who is haunted by tales of “home”--a Cuba of ancestral memory, beauty, sensuousness, and ease, a place he has never known—and by the sudden death of his father. His struggle toward adulthood is inseparable from his struggle to understand his “Cubanness” and to come to terms with his father, an exuberant, charming, and generous hotel cook who drank too much, disappeared for days, and gambled the family’s money away. Moving, intimate, and highly autobiographical, this unforgettable novel of immigrant life is written with the same compelling power of language, character, and narrative that won Oscar Hijuelos worldwide acclaim. Includes an Introduction and Afterword by the author, as well as a new Foreword by Pablo Medina, author of Cubop City Blues and the memoir Exiled Memories, aming others.
