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Challenge Update (Aug 2025)

As you know, in 2024 I decided to focus my readings on the Asian continent. It all started with a challenge on Instagram. In 2025 I decided to create the challenge myself. Welcome to the great Read More Latin Authors in 2025!

Here’s how it works: we have 9 categories to fill in. You’ll need to read:

• A book from Central America
• A book from South America
• A book from Mexico
• A book published before the year 2000
• New Author (debut after 2010)
• A book by any LA author
• A translated book
• A non-fiction book from a Latin author
• A Classic of Latin American Literature

You can join the challenge on Instagram and tag your posts with #ReadMoreLAAuthors. I’ll be posting recommendations for every category here on the blog and on my Instagram page, so stay tuned!

Here’s one of each to get you started, and their blurbs:

A book from Central America

Severina, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa (Guatemala)

“Right from the start I picked her for a thief, although that day she didn’t take anything. . . . I knew she’d be back,” the narrator/bookseller of Severina recalls in this novel’s opening pages. Imagine a dark-haired book thief as alluring as she is dangerous. Imagine the mesmerized bookseller secretly tracking the volumes she steals, hoping for insight into her character, her motives, her love life. In Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s hands, this tale of obsessive love is told with almost breathless precision and economy.

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A book from South America

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)

Gabriel García Márquez’s finest and most famous work, the Nobel Prize-winning One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles, through the course of a century, life in Macondo and the lives of six Buendía generations-from José Arcadio and Úrsula, through their son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía (who commands numerous revolutions and fathers eighteen additional Aurelianos), through three additional José Arcadios, through Remedios the Beauty and Renata Remedios, to the final Aureliano, child of an incestuous union. As babies are born and the world’s “great inventions” are introduced into Macondo, the village grows and becomes more and more subject to the workings of the outside world, to its politics and progress, and to history itself.

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A book from Mexico

Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel (Mexico)

Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.
The number one bestseller in Mexico and America for almost two years, and subsequently a bestseller around the world, Like Water For Chocolate is a romantic, poignant tale, touched with moments of magic, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit – and recipes.

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A book published before the year 2000

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis (Brazil)

“Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man,” writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil’s greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave.

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New Author (debut after 2010)

The Murmur of Bees, by Sofía Segovia (Mexico)

From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can—visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous.

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A book by any LA author

Dominicana, by Angie Cruz (Dominican Republic)

Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn’t matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year’s Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan’s free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay.

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A translated book

Crooked Plow, by Itamar Vieira Junior (Brazil)

‘I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.’ ”Say something!” she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.’
Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

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A non-fiction book

Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay)

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

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A Classic of Latin American Literature

The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende (Chile)

The House of the Spirits, the unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.

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Check more Latin American literature:
– Latin America page
– Book Review: Island Beneath the Sea
– Doramar: Stories of Those Who Were Forgotten