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Podcast: Book Friends Forever
Episode: Empress of the Splendid Season by Oscar Hijuelos foreword by Elizabeth Strout read by Aida Reluzco
Description: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos brings the joys and heartbreaks of twentieth-century America vividly to life in this “tender” novel (New York Times Book Review).
Lydia España—once a wealthy, spoiled daughter of Cuba—works at a sewing factory in New York. Adjusting to her sharp change of circumstances, missing the days when her prosperous father provided her with every luxury, she ruminates on the incident that drove her away from her homeland in the late 1940s—until she falls in love with Raul, a kindhearted, working-class waiter who sees Lydia as the “Queen of the Congo Line” she used to be: the...