Katie Gutierrez is the author of the national bestselling debut novel, "More Than You'll Ever Know," which was also featured as the GMA Book Club pick for June 2022.
Latino literature is as dazzling, rich and varied as the communities that build us, and narrowing my recommendations down to five for Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month felt impossible. But each of these novels moved me, inspired me, and made me feel seen. I know they'll do the same for new readers.
Luis Alberto Urrea was one of the authors who introduced me to Latino literature with "The Hummingbird's Daughter", and his masterful work includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Among these, I particularly love "The House of Broken Angels" for its brilliantly condensed timeline -- it's a family epic taking place in one weekend in California, when the extended De la Cruz family comes together for their matriarch's funeral and their big brother/patriarch, Big Angel's, last birthday -- and haunting ruminations on aging and mortality. Urrea can conjure entire lives in just a few words, and every page brims with humor, empathy and poetry. If you haven't read Urrea's novels, I envy you these first reading experiences.
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Brisma and Kelly have been friends through the wildness of childhood, the intimacy of coming of age, and now the complexities of early adulthood -- a tight and complicated bond that is tested when Brisma's ex-boyfriend Brian is accused of sexual assault. Torres captures the emotional and physical landscapes of these women's lives with exquisite, almost painful immediacy, bringing new insights to the conversation about sexual violence in communities of color. I read this debut in two breathless sittings. It's not to be missed.
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I read Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" for the first time this summer, and it left me craving similar Gothic stories that seethe with dread. I found one in "The Hacienda," with the bonus that it's set in Mexico, where my own ancestors are from, just after the Mexican War of Independence. The novel is meticulously researched, exploring the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition, the racist casta system, and the choices women have always been forced to make for their own version of independence -- but it's also a literal ghost story, reminding me of the stories I first fell in love with as a kid, reading deep into the night.
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"How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water "uses the unusual structure of twelve sessions with a career counselor to tell the story of Cara Romero, a Dominican woman in her mid-fifties who is looking for work in the Great Recession after losing her decades-long job in the "factory of little lamps." Write this down: Cara Romero is unforgettable. Her voice -- warm, funny, captivating, heartbreaking -- carries the novel, which brilliantly deconstructs what kinds of labor are valued in late-stage American capitalism. Revisiting this book, as I know I will, will feel like revisiting an old friend who always, thankfully, has more stories to tell.
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"The Family Izquierdo" invites us into the lives of three generations of a Mexican-American family living in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, an area with deep similarities to where I grew up in Laredo, Texas (though people from our cities would be quick to distinguish which 956 our area codes refer to!). The Izquierdos are struggling to overcome what their deteriorating patriarch, Papa Tavo, believes is a curse set on them by a jealous neighbor, the Brujo Contreras. The novel is constructed as interlinked stories that move backward and forward through time and family members, and each story is powerful and indelible, self-contained yet inescapably part of a whole -- like the Izquierdos themselves. Reading this beautiful debut felt like coming home.
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Gutierrez's debut novel is an evocative drama about a woman caught leading a double life after one husband murders the other, and the true-crime writer who becomes obsessed with telling her story.
