Celebrity Book Club Picks by Latine Authors

A 2025 selection for Dua Lipa’s Service95 book club.

New York City in the 1980s was a mesmerizing, wild place. A hotbed of hip-hop, underground culture, and unmatched creative energy, it spawned some of the most significant art of the 20th century. It was where Jean-Michel Basquiat became an avant-garde street artist and painter, swiftly achieving worldwide fame. During the years before his death at the age of 27, he shared his life with his lover and muse, Suzanne Mallouk. A runaway from an unhappy home in Canada, Suzanne first met Jean-Michel in a bar on the Lower East Side in 1980. Thus began a tumultuous and passionate relationship that deeply influenced one of the most exceptional artists of our time. In emotionally resonant prose, Jennifer Clement tells the story of Suzanne and Jean-Michel’s unforgettable affair.

A 2020 Reese’s Book Club selection.

A romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends. A marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences. A young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival. Two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives. A baby’s christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new. A man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity.

Selected for Reese’s Book Club in 2018.

Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, 19-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba’s high society, largely sheltered from the country’s growing political unrest — until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary. Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa’s last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast between Cuba’s tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate, where she’ll need the lessons of her grandmother’s past to understand the true meaning of courage.

A 2024 Read with Jenna Book Club pick.

Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting.” Told in a series of vignettes — sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous — Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time.

A 2022 Read with Jenna Book Club selection.

Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago — “one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.” At nine, Javier Zamora leaves his beloved aunt and grandparents in El Salvador on a 3,000-mile journey to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. What he expects to be a two-week adventure becomes a perilous trek. Gripping and moving, Solito is an intimate memoir of a near-impossible journey and the unexpected kindness and love he finds along the way.

Selected as a 2024 Good Morning America Book Club pick.

In 1950s Hollywood, every actress wants to play the star-making lead in a big-budget epic about the legendary woman whose story has captivated artists since ancient times. So when the film’s mercurial director casts Vera Larios, an unknown Mexican ingenue, in the role, she becomes the talk of the town overnight — and an object of envy for Nancy Hartley, a bit player whose career has stalled and who will do anything to claim the fame she believes she deserves. Two actresses clawing toward the top in a city overflowing with gossip, scandal, and intrigue make for a sizzling combination.

A 2024 Good Morning America Book Club pick.

Malas begins in 1951, when a mysterious woman curses Pilar Aguirre and her family in the border town of La Cienega, Texas. More than forty years later, rebellious teenager Lulu Muñoz is navigating family turmoil, a secret punk band, and her upcoming quinceañera. After her grandmother’s death, Lulu forms an unlikely bond with a glamorous outcast, uncovering long-buried family secrets that connect the past to her own future.

A 2026 Dakota Johnson TeaTime Book Club pick.

Beginning Middle End follows three generations of women on a journey through Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the narrator’s grandmother once worked. With her marriage over, her mother losing her memory, and her daughter entering adolescence, the narrator wonders: How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong? Their trip becomes a quest for origins, reaching into familial, mythical, and geological pasts.

A 2023 Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club pick.

This powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders offers a chronicle of Alejandra Oliva’s experience interpreting at the U.S.-Mexico border. Oliva, a Mexican American translator and immigrant justice activist, focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration, looking at how language and opportunity move through each of them: From the river as the waterway that separates the U.S. and Mexico, to the table as the place over which Oliva prepares asylum seekers for their Credible Fear Interviews, and finally, to the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America’s southernmost border. Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion.