10 Latin American and Latinx Books That’ll Have You Planning Your Next Trip

Set between the streets of Mexico City and the coast of Oaxaca, Chloe Aridjis’ novel Sea Monsters is a sometimes surreal snapshot of a sometimes surreal Mexico in the late 80s. Seventeen-year-old Luisa is disenchanted with her life in the capital, so she boards a bus to the beach with a boy she barely knows, in the hope of finding a troupe of Soviet circus performers. In real life, you’re unlikely to find a roaming band of Soviet acrobats on Zipolite Beach, Oaxaca, but we can all sympathize with the need to skip the city for the sea.

Ash is falling from the sky and memories of the dead are irrepressible in post-Pinochet Santiago, Chile. In this dark novel, Trabucco Zerán—with the help of Sophie Hughes’ masterful English translation—depicts both a recognisable and entirely obscured Chile, in which the children of ex-militants (Felipe, Iquela, and Paloma) are haunted by what they’ve failed to remember and yet cannot forget. As they take a road trip to retrieve Iquela’s dead mother, Trabucco Zerán moves us from the city to the Cordillera with ease.

Martín Adán's The Cardboard House—available in two English-language translations by either Katherine Silver and José Garay Boszeta—reimagines his childhood in Peru. Neither novel nor short story, this book is actually a collection of vignettes, all loosely woven together to create a tapestry of Barranco, Lima in the early 20th century. A poet rather than a prose writer, Adán’s snatches of life in Peru are as lyrical and precise as you’d imagine and have drawn comparisons with Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.

The Colombian coastline of Pilar Quintana’s The Bitch is neither the hospitable nor picturesque place of your travel brochure dreams. Set on the less popular Pacific (as opposed to the Caribbean) coast, The Bitch puts forth a place in which nature rules with an iron fist, where the jungle swallows the living and the sea returns the dead. Thankfully, while the Colombia of Quintana’s novel is decidedly bleak, a visit to this lively country will almost certainly prove quite the opposite.

Five LGBTQ+ friends seek refuge in each other and Cabo Polonio in 70s Uruguay, as a decidedly anti-gay military dictatorship rages on in the background. Split between Montevideo and their isolated hideaway, Cantoras spans nearly four decades and serves as a testament to community and love in the midst of utter disaster. And we'd be very surprised if you don’t find yourself wanting to seek solace in Cabo Polonio by the time you’ve finished reading.

A mute Argentine artist dedicates his life to painting gargantuan rolls of canvas which depict six decades on the Argentina-Uruguay border and must be unraveled both literally and figuratively by his sons upon his death. However, one canvas is absent. So begins the search for the titular Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, which transports character and reader alike to tiny villages in the hunt for the final piece of the puzzle.

A loose riff on her mother’s immigration story, Angie Cruz’s Dominicana splits its time between the sticky heat of the Dominican countryside and the chilly heights—Washington Heights, that is—of New York City. Trapped in a marriage she doesn’t want with a man twice her age, Ana Cancion is lonely and very much not in love, neither with her husband nor with her new NYC life, but the way Cruz conjures up Ana’s coming-of-age in the Big Apple will have you wanting to pound the streets for yourself.

A classic in Brazil, São Bernardo has been twice translated into English, most recently by Canadian author Padma Viswanathan. Often overlooked and overshadowed by Brazil’s big cities—São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—the northeast is the star of this dryly funny novel, which is densely packed with real and invented, convoluted and obscure idioms hailing (or not) from the region.

Told in an effervescent Spanglish, Julián Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre Tropical is set against the sticky and languorous backdrop of Latinx Miami, where our teenage protagonist’s mother has been sucked into evangelical christianity. A tale of intergenerational, coming-of-age angst and LGBTQ+ first love, Fiebre Tropical might not have you pining for the specific Florida of Francisca and Carmen, but Delgado Lopera’s ability to capture place in print is undeniable.

Editor's note: Travel to Haiti is not recommended due to serious safety risks in this area. Please follow your government's guidance and travel advisories.

Prolific author Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light may take place in the fictional Ville Rose, but her deeply engrossing narrative of life in this Haitian fishing village will have you itching to pay a visit to the country that inspired such storytelling. Short and affecting, Claire of the Sea Light tells the tale of a missing girl in a series of evocative interconnected vignettes, in which the sea plays a dreadful and constant role.