Oscar Hijuelos

In a part sequel and part retelling of "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," the inspiration for the Mambo Kings' biggest hit, Maria, now 60 years old, reminisces about her days and nights in Havana, offering a completely different perspective on the Mambo Kings' story.

When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is a devoutly religious man who, despite his beginnings in a foundling home, has fashioned for himself an enviable life. A successful Madison Avenue advertising illustrator, Ives is married to a vivacious, artistic woman, Annie, who shares his aesthetic passions and religious beliefs. Together they raise their children, Robert and Caroline, with remarkable fair-mindedness and moral judgment. Ives, who knows nothing of his own natural ancestry, is profoundly drawn to the Spanish cultures and language that have begun to flourish in 1950s New York City. Even after he has risen to a vice-presidency at the advertising agency, he continues to live in his unfashionable neighborhood in Upper Manhattan because he feels at home among his multi-ethnic neighbors, especially his closest friend, Luis Ramirez, and his family. But Ives' perfect world is violated when seventeen-year-old Robert is gunned down by a teenage thug at Christmas, just months before the young man is to enter the seminary. Having once considered himself as possessing "a small, imperfect spiritual gift," Mr. Ives finds himself lost without his son, doubting not only the foundations of his life but his belief in God. Overwhelmed by grief and threatened with a loss of faith in humankind, Ives must wrestle with his doubts and struggle to regain spiritual peace, perhaps even embracing the troubled young man who stole Robert's promising life.

In the 1960s, Rico Fuentes, a pale-skinned Cuban American teenager, abandons drug-infested New York City for the picket fence and apple pie world of Wisconsin, only to discover that he still feels like an outsider and that violent and judgmental people can be found even in the wholesome Midwest. In the 1960s, Rico, a pale-skinned Cuban American teenager, abandons drug-infested New York City for Wisconsin, only to discover violent and judgmental people can be found even in the wholesome Midwest. The plot contains profanity and sexual situations.

In his first work of nonfiction, the author writes about the people and places that inspired his previous novels. Born in Manhattan's Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, he introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry-writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of an often-prejudiced working class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship to his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn in pre-Castro Cuba with his mother, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved. With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, this work follows the author's subsequent quest for his true identity into adulthood, through college and beyond, a mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings of his fiction.--From publisher description.

"In his new novel, Oscar Hijuelos, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, brings to life the rambunctious Montez O'Brien family. The father, Nelson O'Brien, is an enterprising Irish immigrant who travels to Cuba as a photographer during the Spanish-American War in 1898, and there he meets his future wife, the sensitive, aristocratic, poetic Mariela Montez. As they are enroute to America in 1902, their first daughter, Margarita, whose reminiscences inform much of this novel's narrative, is born at sea. The Montez O'Briens settle in a small Pennsylvania town, where Nelson practices his photography trade and runs the Jewel Box Movie Theater, and Mariela gives birth to thirteen more daughters and then, finally, a son." "As Margarita looks back on her long and full life, the novel recounts the lives, loves, and tragedies of the Montez O'Briens and their always complex relations with one another. It also follows Emilio through his days in Greenwich Village, the army, and Hollywood, where, as Monty O'Brien, he stars in grade-B detective and Tarzan movies and pals around with screen idols like Errol Flynn. Never altogether at peace in the overwhelming feminine world of his family, he searches restlessly for an elusive true love. And after an unhappy early marriage, Margarita herself finds the deepest passion of her life in extreme old age." "The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien is a raucous and heartfelt epic that spans both the continent and our century, a celebration of the moments of earthly happiness that give meaning to diverse yet deeply interrelated existences and of the constantly surprising, regenerating life force that keeps insisting on change and renewal."--BOOK JACKET.

Street-smart and lyrical, impassioned and reflective, this novel is a rich and provocative book--a moving portrait of a man, his family, a community, and a time.

This story follows the friendship between 19th-century journalist-explorer Henry Stanley and Mark Twain throughout a journey to Cuba in search of Stanley's father. Chronicles the sojourn of journalist-explorer Henry Stanley; his wife, the painter Dorothy Tennant; and Mark Twain, Stanley's longtime friend, as they head for Cuba in search of Stanley's father.

It is 1947 and Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life had once been a dream of music, love and sadness, is returning to Habana, Cuba, from Spain, where he has just recovered from the physical and spiritual malaise resulting from his experiences in Paris, then Buchenwald, during the Nazi occupation of France. (A devout Catholic, Levis had been mistakenly identified as a Jew because of his name.) When Levis arrives back in Habana, after an absence of many years, his mind is reeling with beautiful memories of his life in Cuba and in Paris before the war, a life of pleasure and excitement that he owes, in part, to an unrequited, nearly "chivalrous" romance with a certain Rita Valladares, a singer for whom Levis had written his most famous song, "Rosas Puras," or "Pretty Roses." This 1928 composition becomes the most famous rumba in the world and changes both American and European tastes in music and dance forever; and it is the song, symbolic of the composer's love for Rita Valladares, that sets Levis's life in Europe in motion.

This award-winning first novel from the author of the National Book Award nominee The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was applauded by the New York Times Book Review as "a novel of great warmth and tenderness ... a virtuoso writing that describes immigrant life in New York ... a loving and deeply felt tribute."