Empress of the Splendid Season A Novel

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos brings the joys and heartbreaks of twentieth-century America vividly to life in this "tender" novel (New York Times Book Review).

Lydia España—once a wealthy, spoiled daughter of Cuba—works at a sewing factory in New York. Adjusting to her sharp change of circumstances, missing the days when her prosperous father provided her with every luxury, she ruminates on the incident that drove her away from her homeland in the late 1940s—until she falls in love with Raul, a kindhearted, working-class waiter who sees Lydia as the “Queen of the Congo Line” she used to be: the empress of "the most beautiful and splendid season, which is love.”

Despite their age difference, a loving marriage follows, as well as two children. Lydia revels in her newfound happiness, but when Raul’s health declines, she finds her fortunes reversed yet again. Now working as a cleaning lady, Lydia can’t help but contrast her experiences with those of her clients, whose secret lives and day-to-day realities are so starkly different from her own—but over time, the role may prove to be just what she needs to secure a better life for her children.

Written with absorbing, magnetic prose, this tenderly rendered novel follows a proud, hardworking woman through the ups and downs of her life. It is Hijuelos at his masterful best, a lasting and expert portrayal of the highs and lows of chasing—and living—the “American Dream.”

Includes a Reading Group Guide.

Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013), a native New Yorker and the son of Cuban immigrants, was a Pulitzer Prize winning author of nine novels and a memoir and a recipient of the Rome Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He became the first Latino winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990 for his international bestseller The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and his novels have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!; Olive, Again; Anything is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Price; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; and her most recent Tell Me Everything. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine.