Best-selling author shares 5 books to celebrate Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month

Latino literature is as dazzling, rich, and varied as the communities that build us, and narrowing down my recommendations to five for Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month seemed impossible. But each of these novels moved me, inspired me, and made me feel seen. I know they will do the same for new readers.

Luis Alberto Urrea was one of the authors who introduced me to Latin literature with “The Hummingbird’s Daughter”, and his masterful work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Of these, I particularly like “The House of Broken Angels” for its brilliantly condensed timeline – it’s a family epic that takes place over a weekend in California, when the extended De la Cruz family reunites for the funeral of their matriarch and big brother/patriarch, Big Angel’s last birthday – and haunting reflections on aging and mortality. Urrea can conjure up entire lives with just a few words, and each page is brimming with humor, empathy and poetry. If you haven’t read Urrea’s novels, I envy you those early reading experiences.

Brisma and Kelly have been friends through the wilderness of childhood, the intimacy of coming of age and now the complexities of early adulthood – a close and complicated bond that is tested when the ex -Brisma’s boyfriend, Brian, is charged with sexual assault. Torres captures the emotional and physical landscapes of these women’s lives with exquisite, almost painful immediacy, bringing new perspectives to the conversation about sexual violence in communities of color. I read this first book in two breathless sittings. This is not to be missed.

I read Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” for the first time this summer, and it made me crave similar goth stories that seethe with dread. I found one in “The Hacienda”, with the added bonus that it takes place in Mexico, where my own ancestors are from, just after the Mexican War of Independence. The novel is meticulously researched, exploring the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition, the racist caste system and the choices women have always been forced to make for their own version of independence – but it’s also a ghost story. literal, reminding me of the stories I first fell in love with as a child, reading deep into the night.

“How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water” uses the unusual structure of twelve sessions with a guidance counselor to tell the story of Cara Romero, a Dominican woman in her fifties who is looking for work during the Great Recession after losing decades of work in the “little lamp factory”. Write this down: Cara Romero is unforgettable. Her voice – warm, funny, captivating, heartbreaking – carries the novel, which brilliantly deconstructs what kinds of work are valued in terminally ill American capitalism. Revisiting this book, as I know I will, will feel like seeing an old friend again who, thankfully, always has more stories to tell.

“The Family Izquierdo” invites us into the lives of three generations of a Mexican-American family living in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, an area with deep similarities to where I grew up in Laredo, Texas (even if the people of our cities would be quick to distinguish which 956 our area codes refer to!). The Izquierdos struggle to overcome what their deteriorating patriarch, Papa Tavo, sees as a curse placed on them by a jealous neighbor, the Brujo Contreras. The novel is constructed as interconnected stories that move forward and backward through time and family members, and each story is powerful and indelible, self-contained but inevitably part of a whole – like the Izquierdos themselves. Reading this beautiful debut was like coming home.