Empress of the Splendid Season - Tapa blanda

"A slow dance, an elegy to a cleaning woman, that continues the author's celebraton of his Cuban roots. A character endowed with romantic yearnings, Lydia moves with stoic grace through the decades...Emotional fine tuning and pitch-perfect prose." -- "Time""Finely detailed, funny, sweet...a deliberately simple story graced with the power of the ordinary."-- "National Public Radio""Simply Splendid...In "Empress of the Splendid Season, " Hijuelos lovingly suggests, true beauty lies in the small moments of a 'decent, genteel, low-key'life..."-- "People""Nobody writes better about sensual life than Hijuelos, and Empress resounds with sights, tastes, humming ambience...His best novel since his Pulitzer-winning "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.""-- "Los Angeles Times""Exuberantly written...Hijuelos is an old-fashioned novelist...In "Empress of the Splendid Season" he has written a story with a lesson--he is telling us how to live."-- "Miami Herald""It's refreshing, in these times of great American prosperity to read a novel about people who are just plain poor. Hijuelos is telling a story about small people, but in his skillful hands, they carry big ideas."-- "USA Today""A richly narrated novel...explores with passion. . .the strange workings of life, love [and] family."-- "Elle""It is hard not to love Lydia Espana."-- "Boston Globe""Oscar Hijuelos's powerful, subtle 'Empress' probes the mysteries of the soul. Hijuelos is a story teller...Along the way he beguiles you with anecdotes, vignettes, memories, dreams, reflections and revelations, in prose that is at times lyrical, at times colloquial, and always lucid."-- "San Diego Union-Tribune""A very human, eminently readable, and very funnybook."-- "National Review""Oscar Hijuelos's fifth novel is in many ways his most personal. . . . In the same lush yet disciplined prose that characterizes his best writing, Hijuelos evokes a personal landscape that proves even moe revealing and more affecting. . . . "-- R"ichmond Times Dispatch""This novel is beautifully evocative of a splendid empress, her culture, her time and her past."-- "Cleveland Plain Dealer""Empress tells the tale of Lydia Espana through short scenes spanning several decades. What emergesis a poignant portrait of a proud woamn who maintains her dignity despite the hard hand life has dealt her. . . a love note to the 'upper class poor'. . . . "-- "San Diego Union Tribune"

A formerly prosperous Cuban emigrT, Lydia Espana, works as a cleaning lady on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to help support her husband and two children, in an evocative novel that captures one woman's struggle, triumph, and frustrations with the American dream. Reprint.