T he Spanish-speaking diaspora—the Hispanidad—has contributed enormously to global literature. In fact, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote —as the translator and publisher Richard Village explained when we asked him to recommend the best novels by Spanish authors —was the starting point from the genre of the European novel grew. We’ve compiled a list of books that have appeared on our site over the years, as a way to mark Hispanic Heritage Month , a celebration of the Hispanic population of the United States.
If you’d like to read more in-depth discussion of the national Spanish-speaking literatures, we can direct you to longer interviews on the best classic Mexican novels , the best Colombian novels , and the best Cuban novels . But we know we can’t cover everything. What classics have we missed? Let us know on social media; we’d love to hear about your favourite books by Hispanic authors.
“What García Márquez does is tell a story of the history and culture of Latin America from the point of view of the ordinary person. He manages to do that through this deadpan narrator who can mix the savagely real with the wonderful, and narrate a family saga which is also a history of Latin America. This book really put Latin American literature on the international map because it is a novel which, while deeply Latin American, is also accessible to all readers.” Read more...
The Best Latin American Novels
John King ,
Literary Scholar
by Rosa Ribas & Charlotte Coombe (translator)
Far by Rosa Ribas, one of Spain’s foremost noir authors, is an unconventional love story and mystery, set on a residential development, unfinished because of the construction crash. Tensions rise between the small community of residents who bought into the dream and people on the fringes of society who occupy the abandoned buildings behind a high metal fence. An unsettling page-turner and insightful social commentary that gives an atmospheric picture of post-crash Spain, Far is a must for lovers of JG Ballard or Lawrence Osborne.
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Isabel Allende—the world's most popular living writer working in Spanish—published her famous magical realist novel The House of the Spirits in 1982, and found immediate global acclaim. It began, she has said, as a long letter to her dying grandfather: "He died and never received the letter, because I kept on writing and writing it. By the end of the year, I had more than 500 pages, and that was my first novel, The House of the Spirits ." The book is a family saga, unfolding over four generations in an unnamed country that appears very like Chile. In it, the youngest daughter of the del Valle family, Clara, has telekinetic and clairvoyant powers—but she cannot, in the end, save her family from violence and heartbreak. It was adapted as a film starring Meryl Streep in 1993; a new television adaptation is currently being developed for Amazon Prime.
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“Fever Dream was her first novel and it led her to be very well-known, especially in the international sphere. Lots of people prefer to read novels to short stories—I mean, I love short stories, but I know that most readers prefer novels. So Fever Dream marked an important change for her. It’s in the margins of science fiction or fantastic literature. Something is happening, and you don’t know if it is real or not.” Read more...
Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels
Claudia Piñeiro ,
Novelist
“One of these stories, ‘The Husband Stitch’, really launched her into public consciousness. Suddenly everyone was talking about her. What I love about that story, and what solidified her role in this contemporary Gothic vein, is that its very melodious, very seductive.” Read more...
Literary Horror Books
Sue Rainsford ,
Novelist
“Moreno-Garcia’s novel The Daughter of Doctor Moreau takes place in Yaxaktun, Mexico, and follows two voices: Doctor Moreau’s daughter Carlota, and his mayordomo (household manager) Montgomery. The doctor is creating human-animal hybrids, claiming that they offer hope of medical advances—but he is also beholden to a patron, who hopes the experiments will ultimately provide cheap labour. The moral uncertainty is well-drawn, but takes a back seat to the human (or part-human) relationships. These feel real; there are no simplistic character choices made to serve romance or villainy, and the resulting relationships are unpredictable and compelling. The story also gains verisimilitude from its historical setting, with fact and fiction deftly woven together.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2023: The Hugo Awards
Sylvia Bishop ,
“Rulfo does a lot of things in this novel, while endowing a tremendous poetic force both to language and to the events, the characters and the atmospheres he describes; he experiments with a fragmentary structure; breaks down the sense of reality through the idea of the ghost and the popular legends, the people’s sayings. Comala is a powerful mythical universe that represents abandonment and loss from many angles. The characters have an extraordinary strength and reach a very complex degree of conflict, determined above all by the fragility and harm of a very macho way of understanding masculinity.” Read more...
Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels
Ave Barrera ,
Novelist
“The story of Cervantes is as insane as the story of Don Quixote . Again, it’s super-reductive to say that the book mirrors the life of the author. But the fact is that Cervantes was a soldier in the tercios in Flanders. He was captured by Barbary pirates and a galley slave for five years. Cervantes’s life was absolutely extraordinary and quite representative, I think, of the madness that was Spain at the beginning of the 17th century.” Read more...
The Best Novels by Spanish Authors
Richard Village ,
“The places he describes in his fiction are places where I grew up. In the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , there’s a scene where Oscar Wao tries to kill himself by jumping off a rail bridge across the Raritan river. That bridge is just down the street from my house. To this day, I can’t take a train across it without thinking of that incident. As far as I’m concerned, it happened. Oscar Wao is very real to me. When I read Wao, I think, there but for the grace of God go I.” Read more...
Kushanava Choudhury on Calcutta Influences
Kushanava Choudhury ,
“The novel is really about the un settling of the West, and it revisits that classic hero of the Western novel: the ‘American Adam.’ This is the figure who tries to throw off history, tries to sever his family ties, and tries to break free from the past in order to experience rebirth and renewal in the so-called Edenic spaces of the West. But what Håkan finds instead is a devastating lack of connection and belonging. He experiences a kind of soul-crushing loneliness and a very limited and truncated life.” Read more...
Landmark Western Novels
Susan Kollin ,
Literary Scholar
“This is about love as opposed to sex. He’s talking about love in all its forms, including unrequited love that goes on for 50 years…It’s partly such a passionate book because of the beauty of the prose, describing love through time and how she found contentment – love, passion and sex all in one. The prose just drips sexuality and sensuality. It’s sexy enough without having to read about deep positions or anything” Read more...
The best books on Sex and Marriage
Kate Figes ,
Journalist
Esther García Llovet and Richard Village (translator)
Spanish Beauty by Esther García Llovet is a surreal, anarchic noir romp set against the backdrop of the capital of mass tourism, Benidorm. Half-English, half-Spanish protagonist Michela is a badass cop who acts on the wrong side of the law and is on a mission to get her hands on Reggie Kray’s Dunhill lighter. With a supporting cast of hapless petty criminals, Russian crime bosses and an absent father figure, the book goes on a whirlwind tour beyond the fry-ups and sangria to the seedy underbelly of the Pearl of the Costa Blanca.
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“I read Aura as a teenager and it both terrified and fascinated me, but above all it invited me to join that search among dark corners that is literature. It is a very brief and self-contained novel that maintains the tension in each line. What I most admire about it is its ability to build atmosphere and cause us to feel trapped in this shady house among the smell of moss and decaying plants.” Read more...
Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels
Ave Barrera ,
Novelist
“This one is an all-time family favourite…It’s so funny, while also dealing with some more serious subjects. The main character, Sal, has type one diabetes and so did his mother, who died before the start of the book. While he was learning meditation techniques for helping to cope with his grief, he figured out how to rip holes into other universes and pull things through, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. At the very beginning he’s starting out at a new school, and there’s somebody who’s being a bully to him. He winds up pulling a dead chicken into that bully’s locker from a chicken processing factory that’s nearby in another universe, and that sets off a chain of events.” Read more...
The Best Audiobooks for a Family Road Trip
Emily Connelly ,
Journalist
“It packs so much into less than 2500 words. It’s a beautiful mix of nature and technology and religion and ritual, which is something that I love, and that I did some work on with some of my novellas. I love the intersection of biology and technology. To my mind, all technology is really mankind trying to control natural and biological processes, and science is our attempt to figure out how to do it. And the reality is, we’re trying to reproduce things that already exist in nature: nature already knows how to do these incredible, fabulous, insane things.” Read more...
The Best Sci-Fi Short Stories
R.S.A. Garcia ,
Short Story Writer
🏆 Joint winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Hernan Diaz's award-winning second novel is set in a world of extreme wealth in New York throughout the 20th-century. The New York Times called it "intricate, cunning and consistently surprising."
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“Los Conspiradores is a historical novel that fictionalises the early parts of the Mexican War of Independence and, in particular, the conspiracy led by Father Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of Dolores in Guanajuato. It fictionalises these events in part by giving fictional names to all of the characters and to all of the towns in which it is set.” Read more...
The best books on Mexican history
Timo Schaefer ,
Historian
“Selva Almada is, in many ways, the writer of the river. She often sets her stories on a river landscape. This has is rooted in a very interesting tradition in Argentinian literature or literature from the River Plate, whereby othe well-known writers have taken the river as a scenario to explore a certain narrative. Not a River is a book written by a woman, but the main characters are men. In other words, Selva shows in this novel a very masculine world. I don’t want to spoil the story, but the focus is on three big, masculine men who treat the river as if they were its owners.” Read more...
Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels
Claudia Piñeiro ,
Novelist
“It’s another one of our classics. It’s a fantastic book. It’s about a lady and a man who run away. First, they go to the Llanos Orientales, a place in the centre of Colombia which is huge and wild. They end up disappearing into the jungle and getting swallowed up by it. It’s an adventure novel, but it’s also about the struggle of the indigenous people during the Amazon rubber boom. It’s a very painful novel, because it tells us how the indigenous peoples of those areas of Colombia became slaves during the rubber boom…La vorágine is very realistic. What I like most about the book is its description of Colombian nature—of the jungle, the skies, the rivers—which is very important to me as a writer. Along with Jorge Isaacs, the author of María , he was a master at this. They were important teachers for me in how to write about the nature that surrounds me. They notice it. They were able to see the nature around them with the eyes of a foreigner, which is to be amazed by it…It’s the story of a man who is running away from the life that he has to live and looking for his own destiny. He’s not a good man. He’s an outcast and a renegade. I like it also because of that: it’s a dark, dark novel, set in a dark place with a dark character, who is not a hero. He’s an anti-hero. But when he sees the reality of those people suffering, he starts changing.” Read more...
The Best Colombian Novels
Pilar Quintana ,
Novelist
“There are countless novels about the Mexican Revolution, but what fascinated me about Nellie Campobello’s book is her ability to represent the reality of violent warfare not on from the viewpoint of the conflicting parties, but through the emotions; it is the perspective of a girl that reveals the paradox of violence, both in its significance and its futility. I think Cartucho should be read in schools the world over.” Read more...
Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels
Ave Barrera ,
Novelist
“This is a collection of ghost stories. Enríquez uses the conventions of gothic horror and the macabre to write these brilliantly strange parables about the modern world. Her settings are detailed and concrete and realistic, mainly in Buenos Aires—she’s an Argentinian writer. The stories are very unsettling. But they’re also colourful and flamboyant, and sometimes disconcertingly funny, and always icily intelligent. They have the energy of ghosts that just won’t agree to be exorcised.” Read more...
The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist
Lucy Hughes-Hallett ,
Biographer
“It’s the story of a Spanish woman called Berta Isla, who as a student during Franco’s dictatorship in the late 60s, early 70s, meets and falls in love with another student, a man called Tomás Nevinson. He’s half-English, half-Spanish—with a Spanish first name and an English last name. Tomás goes off to Oxford and gets recruited to be a spy. All he wants to do is go back to Madrid, live with Berta and have a good life, but he’s trapped into becoming part of the British secret services and has to live a double life. It’s about a couple living this double life.” Read more...
The Best Novels by Spanish Authors
Richard Village ,
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