Title: Empress of the splendid season
Description: In his new novel, Hijuelos tells the story of Lydia Espana, a beautiful and formerly prosperous emigre from pre-Castro Cuba, who becomes a cleaning lady in New York. Once the spoiled, pampered daughter of a small-town mayor and adored by men - a 'queen of the Conga line' - she is forced because of a youthful sexual indiscretion to leave home and, in 1947, finds herself suddenly living the life of the working poor. In time she falls in love with Raul, a humble waiter.

One night in a Manhattan ballroom, in the middle of a bolero, Raul proposes marriage, for Lydia is his "empress of the most beautiful and splendid season, which is love.".

A life of promise is disrupted when Raul falls ill and Lydia, finding employment as a domestic, becomes the head of the family. Striving to educate her two children, Rico and Alicia, in the style of the upper class, she must endure a lesson in humility, cleaning the homes of New Yorkers much better off than herself. Among her employers is Mr.

Osprey, a reserved and kindly lawyer, who eventually takes an interest in her family's well-being and, during the turmoil of the 1960s, intervenes at a critical juncture in the life of her teenage son, Rico. Throughout this novel Lydia remains a sensual and powerful woman who meets the trials of a lonely life with humor and a gleam of triumph in her eye - a sense that she is someone special - an empress of fortitude, of dignity.
Subjects: Cuban Americans, Conduct of life, Empleadas de la limpieza, Mujeres cubano-americanas, Women cleaning personnel, Cubano-americanos, Fiction, Cuban American women, Familias cubano-americanas, Cuban American families, Domestic fiction, Ficción, Fiction, sagas, New york (n.y.), fiction, Cuban americans, fiction
Places: New York, New York (N.Y.), New York (State), Nueva York (Nueva York)