Our House in the Last World - by Oscar Hijuelos (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in the debut--and most autobiographical--novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

Winner of the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award and the Rome Prize

Hector Santinio is the younger son of Alejo and Mercedes, who moved to New York from Cuba in the mid-1940s. The family of four shares their modest apartment with extended relatives in Harlem, where homesickness and nostalgia are dispelled by nights of dancing and raucous parties. But life's realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family's adoptive land.

When Mercedes takes Hector and his brother to visit Cuba, to better know her culture, Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to a terrifying period of hospitalization back in the United States where, isolated from his family, he loses much of his ability to speak Spanish. And it is this fracturing that sparks a lifelong quest to not only reconcile his Cuban identity with his American one, but to also understand his parents' ambitions and anxieties within the country at large.

In this profoundly moving account of immigrant life, Oscar Hijuelos displays, once again, his mastery over both character and language--and sets readers on an unforgettable journey of hope, longing, and self-discovery.

Includes a Reading Group Guide.

Review Quotes

"Never loses the syntax of magic . . . a novel of great warmth and tenderness."--New York Times Book Review

"A story that stands up for the dignity of American immigrants."--Esmeralda Santiago, author of When I Was Puerto Rican

"Elegiac as well as bittersweet and celebratory."--Publishers Weekly

"Marked by eloquently trimmed prose, great assurance, and uncompromising darkness."--Kirkus

About the Author

Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013), a native New Yorker and the son of Cuban immigrants, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of nine novels and a memoir and a recipient of the Rome Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He became the first Latino winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990 for his international bestseller The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and his novels have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Junot Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (both Riverhead), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. His first picture book, Islandborn, (Dial) was a New York Times Bestseller and won the CLASP Américas Award 2019.