A 35th anniversary edition of the acclaimed debut novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love . With a new Foreword by Pablo Medina. Set in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, this is the coming-of-agestory of Hector Santinio, the American-born son of Cuban immigrants, whois haunted by tales of "home"--a Cuba of ancestral memory, beauty,sensuousness, and ease, a place he has never known--and by the suddendeath of his father. His struggle toward adulthood is inseparable fromhis struggle to understand his "Cubanness" and to come to terms with hisfather, an exuberant, charming, and generous hotel cook who drank toomuch, disappeared for days, and gambled the family's money away. Moving, intimate, and highly autobiographical, this unforgettable novelof immigrant life is written with the same compelling power of language,character, and narrative that won Oscar Hijuelos worldwide acclaim. Includes an Introduction and Afterword by the author, as well as a newForeword by Pablo Medina, author of Cubop City Blues and the memoir Exiled Memories, aming others.