The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Series

Recommended Reading Order

1. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

   • Oscar Hijuelos

   • 407 pages
   • 15 hours of reading

   It's 1949. Two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. It is the era of the mambo, and Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth—a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep affection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love , Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss and memory and desire.

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2. Beautiful Maria of My Soul. Or the True Story of Maria Garcia Y Cifuentes, the Lady Behind a Famous Song

   • Oscar Hijuelos

   “Savor the mysterious power of a master’s pentimento.” —Los Angeles Times “It takes a lot of nerve and skill to pull off something as rich as Beautiful MarÍa of My Soul, but pull it off Hijuelos does.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer “I fell instantly in love with the glorious soul of Beautiful MarÍa of My Soul. Hijuelos has created and brought to life two beloved characters, a heart-stealing heroine and Havana during an epoch of changing fate.” —Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club In Beautiful MarÍa of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos returns to the passionate tale he began twenty years ago in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. MarÍa is the great Cuban beauty who stole musician Nestor Castillo’s heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings’ biggest hit, “Beautiful MarÍa of My Soul.'” Now in her sixties and living as an exile in Miami, MarÍa remains a beauty, still capable of turning heads. But while she left Cuba decades ago, she has never forgotten Nestor. As she thinks back to her days—and nights—in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the Mambo Kings story unfolds. Beautiful MarÍa of My Soul is a stunning act of reinvention, and another contemporary classic from an extraordinarily talented writer.

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