Non-fiction

• "Still Life with Bones" by Alexa Hagerty

An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice.

• "A Flower Traveled in My Blood" by Haley Cohen Gilliland
  

The epic, true story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, grandmothers who fought to find their stolen grandchildren during Argentina’s brutal dictatorship.

• "Somebody is Walking on Your Grave" by Mariana Enríquez

In this rich book of essays—“excursions through death,” she calls them—Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris’s catacombs, Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans’s aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Aires’s opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead.

• "False Calm" by María Sonia Cristoff

Writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia, Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom.

Horror

• "Tender is the Flesh" by Agustina Bazterrica

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore.

• "Thirst" by Marina Yuszczuk

Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

• "Fever Dream" by Samanta Schweblin

Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale.

• "Elena Knows" by Claudia Piñeiro

A unique tale that interweaves crime fiction with intimate tales of morality and search for individual freedom.

Fiction

• "Mona" by Pola Oloixarac

Success as a writer of color proves to be a fresh hell for a young Latin American woman abroad.

• "Bad Girls" by Camila Sosa Villada

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s tale about finding a community on the margins.

• "We Are Green and Trembling" by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

A reimagining of history and the life of Antonio de Erauso, a Basque nun turned war lieutenant during the Spanish Conquista in 17th-century Argentina - a fascinating, largely forgotten figure from world history and one of South America’s most famous trans men.

Fantasy

• "Lobizona" by Romina Garber

Manuela Azul has been crammed into an existence that feels too small for her. As an undocumented immigrant who's on the run from her father's Argentine crime-family, Manu is confined to a small apartment and a small life in Miami, Florida.

Until Manu's protective bubble is shattered.

Short stories

• "The Dangers of Smoking in Bed" by Mariana Enríquez

A collection of singularly unsettling stories, by an Argentine author who has earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges.

🗺️If you want to see more book recommendations from all the countries in the world, check out my Reading the World Spreadsheet.

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