Three Enthralling Books to Read by Hispanic Authors

The Wind Knows My Name

By Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende never disappoints. The Chilean writer, now 83, applies a masterful touch to this novel, which braids two immigrant stories: a Jewish boy escaping Nazi-occupied Austria and a mother and daughter fleeing El Salvador in modern times.

Vienna, 1938: Samuel Adler is scared but sure he will see his parents again when his desperate mother puts him on a Kindertransport train to get him out of terrible danger. His father vanished on Kristallnacht, and his mother sacrifices everything to secure a safe future for her little boy, who boards the train with nothing but a violin to his name.

After delving deep into Samuel’s story, it’s a bit jarring when the timeline and location change completely for the next large section of the book. But soon the reader is equally invested in the book’s second main character.

It’s 2019 in Arizona when little Anita Diaz and her mother flee El Salvador and are separated at the U.S. border. While Anita escapes into a dreamland of her imagination, a young social worker and a hotshot lawyer work together to track down Anita’s missing mother.

The two main characters, Samuel and Anita, have nothing and everything in common. Though they are from different times and cultures, they both suffered isolation and trauma as childhood victims of war and conflict.

The way that Allende connects the two will touch every reader’s heart and remind them that children should never have to suffer for the choices of adults, and that sometimes real family bonds have nothing to do with DNA.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

By Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez is another literary icon who, at 75, continues to write and publish at the highest level with no signs of slowing down. In this novel, the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents returns with a shimmering novel about the stories that never die. Like Allende, Alvarez manages to be profoundly literary with swoonworthy prose and wonderfully propulsive, inciting the reader to turn the pages faster and faster.

Alma Cruz is a retired English professor and writer from Vermont who feels the pull to return to her native Dominican Republic, where she and her family fled many years before. However, Alma doesn’t just go for the palm trees and cerulean waters; she has loftier aims than that. Armed with a bundle of unfinished manuscripts, she buys a house and a plot of land to bury—literally—her untold stories. She hopes they will stop haunting her.

Alvarez employs magical realism as Alma’s book characters, based on people such as her father and the former wife of her country's dictator, will not let their stories die quietly. With the story of Bienvenida, Alvarez returns to the real-life villain of In the Time of the Butterflies, Rafael Trujillo, a cruel and violent despot who loves and then discards his second wife. Bienvenida, a good person who gets tangled up with the worst possible man, is erased by public record—and then by Alma’s inability to finish her story. Only Filomena, Alma’s humble groundskeeper, can hear her story and others. She is a good listener, a wise soul, and has her own unforgettable story to tell. This book will definitely make my Top 10 fiction reads of 2025. It’s mesmerizing.

An American Immigrant

By Johanna Rojas Vann

In this faith-based novel, first-time novelist Rojas Venn bases her character’s mother on her own mother, who fled Colombia in search of a better, safer life and found herself trying to live with one foot in the U.S. and one foot in her homeland.

Twenty-five-year-old Melanie Carvajal is wearing herself out trying to rise above her struggling upbringing as the daughter of a Colombian immigrant. As she works long hours as a journalist at a Miami newspaper, she tries to distance herself from her mother and their shared Colombian culture.

The paper is struggling to make ends meet, and Melanie’s articles are not getting published without tons of editing. She feels her career is hanging by a thread when she gets the chance to go to Colombia for the paper to cover the drug trade there that keeps infiltrating Miami. But when she makes time first to visit her abuela in Cali, the birthplace of salsa music and dancing, Melanie is drawn to her culture for the first time.

Writing evocatively of Colombian food, music, and dance, the author paints a portrait of a country rich in culture but unfortunately labeled as only a haven for cartels. She reminds readers of how important it is to respect and carry on family and ethnic traditions, even those you might not fully understand. Though I enjoyed this story and the Colombian setting, I wish the author had been clearer about her character’s experience of crossing the border and what came next in the intervening years. It would have been richer and added more understanding to the immigrant experience if she had fleshed out her character’s process of becoming a legal citizen.