Beautiful Maria of My Soul
By Oscar Hijuelos

AFTER DECADES, EXPERIENCE THE STORY OF THE MAMBO KING’S THROUGH THE EYES OF NESTOR’S LOVE, MARIA
Oscar Hijuelos, author of BEAUTIFUL MARIA OF MY SOUL (Hyperion, June 1, 2010; Hardcover; $25.99)
Twenty years after the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos revisits this story from a new perspective. In BEAUTIFUL MARIA OF MY SOUL, Nestor Castillo’s María, the beautiful young woman from the first novel who would haunt him for the rest of his days, is now older and looking back on her life, starting with her arrival in Havana from her rural home, a young woman in hope of a new life, a bigger life than the one she left behind. Hijuelos creates in his heroine a complex mix of innocence and calculation, ambition and yearning. And in the pre-Castro Cuba, he sets loose a luscious vision of a city of music, food, and hard living.