Publisher Description
A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in the debut––and most autobiographical––novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
Winner of the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award and the Rome Prize
Hector Santinio is the younger son of Alejo and Mercedes, who moved to New York from Cuba in the mid-1940s. The family of four shares their modest apartment with extended relatives in Harlem, where homesickness and nostalgia are dispelled by nights of dancing and raucous parties. But life’s realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family’s adoptive land.
When Mercedes takes Hector and his brother to visit Cuba, to better know her culture, Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to a terrifying period of hospitalization back in the United States where, isolated from his family, he loses much of his ability to speak Spanish. And it is this fracturing that sparks a lifelong quest to not only reconcile his Cuban identity with his American one, but to also understand his parents’ ambitions and anxieties within the country at large.
In this profoundly moving account of immigrant life, Oscar Hijuelos displays, once again, his mastery over both character and language—and sets readers on an unforgettable journey of hope, longing, and self-discovery.
Includes a Reading Group Guide.
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Just about the finest first novel ever written . . . one of those great works of art that breaks your heart and yet miraculously makes you whole - a towering achievement.
—
Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
About Oscar Hijuelos
Oscar Hijuelos (1951–2013) was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Rome Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was also nominated for the National Book Award. His nine novels have been translated into more than thirty languages.
About the Narrators
Gustavo Rex is an actor known for his narration of the video games Call of Duty: Black Ops and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. He has also narrated several audiobooks including Carlos Santana’s memoir, El Tono Universal.
Junot Díaz is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, he is fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and is the Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.