Empress of the Splendid Season

By Oscar Hijuelos

Book Overview

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 Espa a--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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1538722216
• ISBN13: 9781538722213
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Powerful and amazing

This book gave me the perfect vision of what it's like to have your roots in one place and settle in a strange, foreign place. I loved the humor and simultaneous sadness in this book... It made me cry and laugh at the same time

superb

this book rocks. i especially like the cover

Beautiful.

Lydia's life journey takes her from the tranquil, tropical Cuban countryside to the grind and grit of New York City's tenements, but it also takes her from the height of youth, beauty, privilege, prestige, and pride, to the tedium of middle age and anonymity....a universal journey, intensified by her exiled, immigrant status. Like all true heros, Lydia, with all her flaws, evokes empathy as she "muddles" through life, searching for her truth. Muchas gracias, Oscar......

Not his best but very enjoyable.

"Empress of the Splendid Season" is the story of Lydia Espana, who was a society girl in Cuba before the revolution and who doesn't have such a wonderful life when she emigrates to New York. She is a very complex character, filled with longings and human frailities, but a positive character who is even heroic at times in a modest way. She meets and falls in love with a waiter and they have two children. When Lydia's husband, Raul, becomes ill with his heart, she has to assume the responsibility of supporting the family by her work as a "cleaning lady." She's forced to give up her dreams of romance and of a better life. This is a wonderful book, well worth the time and effort it takes to read it. Oscar Hijuelos is one of the best writers around and fans of his work will not be disappointed by this one. However, I had the impression that this book doesn't break any new ground and doesn't quite rise to the level of his great earlier novels, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" and "Mr. Ives' Christmas."

The Cleaning Lady's Song of Love

Oscar Hijuelos again creates an achingly poignant tale of the myriad joys and sorrows encountered in "ordinary" lives. Wonderfully evocative of New York City throughout the fifties, sixties and early seventies, the story follows the life of Lydia Colon, banished as a teen from her well-to-do family in Cuba by her father, irate over an amorous episode, and tossed into circumstances she considers below her standing. Her young husband's frail health forces her to take a position cleaning the homes of affluent New Yorkers, and brings her painfully close to lives of priviledge and plenty as she herself once felt destined to have. The author captures the fatigue and frustration of lives dimmed by resignation and ill fortune and yet never misses the sometimes brief, but meaningful and mysterious instances when happiness and comfort appear. As in Hijuelos' other works, also addressed are the issues of what it is to be Cuban, how to preserve that identity, and how to pass it along to generations entirely removed from an increasingly mythical island homeland.