The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

It's 1940. Two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. It is the ern of the mambo, and the 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, exuberance, love, and freedom-a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep affection.

Cesar, brassy, bold, and a loner, is a natural musician whose charm and vitality make him irresistible to an endless string of women. Nestor, moody and introspective, though very much married still nurses his unrequited love for Maria, the woman who had left him in Cuba, inspiring his most poignant love songs The high point of the brothers' life perhaps, the "item of eternity" that most constantly surfaces through memory, is their appearance with Desi Arnaz on the I Love Lucy show, where they play Ricky's singing cousins from Cuba and perform their hit "Beautiful María of My Soul."

Oscar Hijuelos's marvelous portrait of the Castillo brothers, their families, their fellow musicians and lovers, their triumphs and tragedies, brings to life the sights and sounds of an era in music and an unsung moment in American life. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, he has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss and memory and desire, an unforgettable love song to life itself.