• The 20th-Anniversary edition of the beloved The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love will be published in conjunction with Beautiful Maria of My Soul.
• Oscar Hijuelos is a critically acclaimed and award-winning author who has won the Pulitzer Prize and the Rome Prize.
• Beatiful Maria of My Soul is a sensual story of lost love, memories revealed, and haunting music of the heart that will reverberate with all readers of quality fiction.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a contemporary American classic, a novel that still captures the imagination 20 years after its first publication. And now, in Beautiful Maria of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos returns to the story, but tells it from the point of view of its beloved heroine, Maria.

She’s the great Cuban beauty, the woman who stole musician Nestor Castillo’s heart and broke it, inspiring him to write The Mambo Kings’ biggest hit, “Beautiful Maria of My Soul.” And here, in Hijuelos’s dazzling new stand-alone novel, she finally takes the spotlight.

Now in her 60s and living in Miami with her pediatrician daughter, Teresa, Maria is still a beauty, still capable of turning heads. But she has never forgotten Nestor, and as she thinks back to her days—and nights—in Havana, an entirely new perspective on The Mambo Kings story unfolds.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul is a stunning feat of re-imagination, another contemporary classic from an extraordinarily talented writer.