A million thanks to Amanda Roff for passing this book onto me before she went to America. Truly one of the most delicious things I've ever read...
It's basically an old Cuban musician holed up in the New York hotel room where he used to fuck innumerable pretty ladies, drinking himself to death and looking back on his life, particularly the times when he and his brother Nestor moved to New York in the late forties and became "The Mambo Kings". As the story takes it's ups and downs, his memories digress into other characters and we get their back stories too.
The writing is so rich it's basically poetry all the way, that sumptuous lusty Latin kind of poetry, and the constant mouth watering, brain fizzing descriptions of food and sex and mambo music had my dying to indulge in all three at once. A very frustrating novel to read on a cramped bus!
Here's a couple non-sequential pages to give you a feel for it...
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