Books To Read if You Love Eva Lasting
Eva Lasting is the romantic coming-of-age Colombian TV show that is taking the world by storm! Set in 1976 in Bogotá, the show revolves around Eva Samper, the first girl ever to attend an all-boys high school. She quickly befriends Camilo Granados and his group of awkward friends. Eva knows far more about the world, literature, and relationships and enjoys taking advantage of her friends’ naïvety. Over the course of the show, Eva will break stereotypes, rules … and a few hearts.
Fans can’t get enough of the show’s humor, its feminist plots, its support of the LGBTQ+ community, and its rich literary recommendations. If you’re new to the show, or eagerly awaiting the release of season three, we have compiled a list of the books mentioned throughout the show, as well as books by Latin American and Colombian authors.
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Add to BookshelfThe Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
One of the books mentioned on the show is The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s most famous work. The play is a farce, playing with love, religion, and truth as it tells the tale of two men, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, who bend the truth in order to add excitement to their lives. But when their deceptions eventually cross paths, it results in a series of crises that threaten to spoil their romantic pursuits.
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$12.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
by Gabriel García Márquez
Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez molds the magical relationship between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza out of the tropical blend of plants and clay until it resembles something between myth and legend. The juices, aromas, and tastes of the tropics inform a fantastical prose that has captivated readers around the world. This beautifully packaged edition — also available in Spanish — features never-before-seen color illustrations by the Chilean artist Luisa Rivera and an interior design created by the author’s son, Gonzalo García Barcha.
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$28.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Romeo y Julieta (Edición Bilingüe) / Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
Another book recommendation from the show is Romeo and Juliet. This carefully crafted bilingual edition brings to life the most celebrated tragedy in literature, “for never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”
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4
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Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Set in Lima, Peru this is the story of a bizarre love triangle whose participants may be the creations of Don Rigoberto’s fertile imagination. The central characters are Rigoberto himself, a dull insurance executive by day, a pornographer and sexual enthusiast by night; Lucrecia, his second wife; and Alfonso, his angel-faced young son. Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto is a compelling mix of fantasy and reality that always keeps the reader guessing.
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$22.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
The title of episode three is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s supremely innovative fictional autobiography. For as he describes the shabby, cloying, and sometimes terrifying Dublin upbringing of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce immerses the reader in his emerging consciousness. The result is a novel of immense boldness, eloquence, and energy, a work that inaugurated a literary revolution and has become a model for the portrayal of the self in our time.
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$11.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Hopscotch
by Julio Cortázar
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves “the Club.” But when tragedy strikes, Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Brimming with literary and vital ambition, reforming narrative techniques, and breaking down genres and conventions, Hopscotch is the essence of Cortázar, with all his ethical and aesthetic complexities, with his imagination and his humor. And don’t miss the Spanish edition, Rayuela.
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$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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A Room of One’s Own
by Virginia Woolf
We can’t think of a more fitting book recommendation for Eva — as the first girl to attend an all-boys high school — than Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts. First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own has been a towering and inspirational statement of feminist principles for nearly a century — and remains relevant now, at a time of growing awareness of the kind of social injustices that she decried.
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$12.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Happy Families
by Carlos Fuentes
In these spectacular vignettes, the internationally acclaimed author Carlos Fuentes explores Tolstoy’s classic observation that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Each story inhabits Fuentes’s trademark Mexico, where modern obsessions bump up against those of the mythic past — and the result is a triumphant display of the many ways we reach out to one another and find salvation through irrepressible acts of love.
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$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
An ardent young woman, her cowardly lover, and her aging vengeful husband — these are the central characters in this stark drama of conflict between passion and convention in the harsh world of 17th-century Boston. Another book recommended in Eva Lasting, The Scarlet Letter is tremendously moving and rich in psychological insight. This dramatic depiction of the struggle between mind and heart illuminates Hawthorne’s concern with our Puritan past and its influence on American life. This classic book is also available in Spanish.
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$4.95Buy from Other Retailers:
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10
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The Sound of Things Falling
by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
An intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia, from international fiction star Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing — and his literary star — even higher. Also available in Spanish.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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11
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Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
In season one, there is an episode titled “Siddhartha.” This book follows a young Brahmin named Siddhartha who searches for ultimate reality after meeting with the Buddha. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, Herman Hesse’s strangely simple novel — also available to read in Spanish — is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory the troubled twentieth-century ever produced.
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$27.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Fruit of the Drunken Tree
by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Seven-year-old Chula lives a carefree life in her gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside her walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar reigns, capturing the attention of the nation. Inspired by the author’s own life, Fruit of the Drunken Tree — also published in Spanish — is a powerful testament to the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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13
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Tess of the D’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
One of Thomas Hardy’s most famous novels is the story of an innocent young woman victimized by the double standards of her day. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is unique among his great novels for the intense feelings that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms of natural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragic fate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, has achieved classic stature. Another great recommendation fitting Eva Samper.
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$10.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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14
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Delirium
by Laura Restrepo
In this remarkably nuanced novel, both a gripping detective story and a passionate, devastating tale of eros and insanity in Colombia, internationally acclaimed author Laura Restrepo delves into the minds of four characters. Through the blend of these distinct voices, Restrepo creates a searing portrait of a society battered by war and corruption, as well as an intimate look at the daily lives of people struggling to stay sane in an unstable reality. Delirium is also available in Spanish.
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$21.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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15
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche’s most accessible and influential philosophical work, misquoted, misrepresented, brilliantly original, and enormously influential, Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission to authority, but in an all-powerful life force: Passionate, chaotic, and free. This blazing book, mentioned in Eva Lasting is also available to read in Spanish.
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$24.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Oye
by Melissa Mogollon
A young woman reckons with her unpredictable family and the revelation of their long-buried history in this wildly inventive debut, which reads like a comic coming-of-age story, a telenovela, and a moving intergenerational saga all rolled into one. Oye is available in both English and Spanish.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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One Thousand and One Nights
by Hanan al-Shaykh
Passed down over centuries from India, Persia, and across the Arab world, the mesmerizing stories of One Thousand and One Nights — a book mentioned in Eva Lasting — are related by the beautiful, young Shahrazad as she attempts to delay her execution. Here are stories of the real and the supernatural, love and marriage, power and punishment, wealth and poverty, and the endless trials and uncertainties of fate.
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$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
by Pablo Neruda
When Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair was first published, it launched into the international spotlight a young and unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation. This book stands as an essential collection that continues to inspire lovers and poets around the world. Find the Spanish edition here.
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$14.00Buy from Other Retailers:
