Books by South American Authors

Born in Peru and raised in Chile, and as a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the second wave of feminism. Among a tribe of like-minded female journalists, Allende felt comfortable in her own skin, as they wrote “with a knife between our teeth” about women’s issues. The Soul of a Woman share “a bold exploration of womanhood, feminism, parenting, aging, love, and more” (Associated Press).

From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family’s otherworldly legacy. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom.

A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother is deported in this alluring coming-of-age novel that “movingly tackles serious issues in one of America’s premier vacation spots” (NPR).

A work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott’s Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality — told through the crucible of one remarkable girl.

From a global star and International Booker Prize finalist, a razor-sharp unforgettable novel about a maid who’s seen too much and a family at a breaking point.

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño’s boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. These fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño’s extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.

A beautifully packaged edition of one of García Márquez’s most beloved novels, with never-before-seen color illustrations by the Chilean artist Luisa Rivera and an interior design created by the author’s son, Gonzalo García Barcha.

Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story, and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.

In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and halfhearted political ambitions, serves up harebrained philosophies, and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave. Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty, and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Borges to Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.

A coming-of-age comedy. A telenovela-worthy drama. A moving family saga. All in a phone call you won’t want to hang up on.

As engrossing as it is innovative, vivid, moving, and full of wit and humor, The President and the Frog explores the resilience of the human spirit and what is possible when danger looms. Ferrying us between a grim jail cell and the president’s lush gardens, the tale reaches beyond all borders and invites us to reimagine what it means to lead, to dare, and to dream.

From the #1 bestselling author of The Alchemist comes an inspiring story about a young man seeking wisdom from an elder, and the practical lessons imparted along the way.