From the back:

"Oscar Hijuelos brings vividly to life the joys, desires, and disappointments of American life witnessed through the experience of a formerly prosperous Cuban émigré named Lydia España, who is now a cleaning woman in New York. In magnetic prose he juxtaposes Lydia's tale with the stories of her clients, contrasting her experiences with the secret lives of those for whom she works. No one writes better of love or the pulse of a city, nor has any writer better captured the complexity inherent in the emigration experience - how assimilation is at once the achievement of dreams and also a loss of the past. Empress of the Splendid Season is Hijuelos at his masterful best, a novel filled with incantatory, rhythmic prose and rich in heartfelt vision."

***

From the book recycling shelf in Kamppi, Helsinki.

Wow, what a treat this book turned out to be! Hijuelos writes masterfully, and the story is full of atmosphere and emotion, yet subtle and refined. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I was very taken with the characters, too, who were very human and certainly not without faults, but that made them more real. I only would have liked to get to know the adult Alicia a lot better.

This was the first novel by Oscar Hijuelos I've read, and I'm going to add his other novels to my wishlist straight away.

Next off to Tsjara who picked it from the Global Village VBB. Enjoy!

Happy travels, lovely book!

Arrived safely in a very cheery looking envelope ^-^ Thanks Annimanni!
This sounds good, looking forward to read it.