Latina authors explore family bonds in forthcoming books
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Esmeralda Santiago. Photo: Robert Curtis/CANTOMEDIA. Book cover courtesy of Knopf
Among the books being released this year are several family sagas and tales of strife told through a Latina lens — a rarity in U.S. publishing.
The big picture: Publishing houses are increasingly putting out and promoting these types of books by diverse authors — and with diverse stories — in response to public pressure to be less white-centric.
- Such books are also finding an audience thanks to social media communities BookTok and Bookstagram, where users often help them become bestsellers
Details: "Las Madres," a novel scheduled to be released Aug. 1 from Esmeralda Santiago, is a multi-generational tale that jumps back and forth between a car accident in 1975 Puerto Rico and the lead-up to Hurricane Maria in 2017.
- Elizabeth Acevedo's "Family Lore," out Aug. 8 in English and Nov. 14 in Spanish, is the Dominican American author's first foray into adult fiction and digs into the secrets among sisters during a three-day period.
- "Familia," by Lauren E. Rico, starts when two women — one in Puerto Rico and one in Brooklyn — take a DNA test and discover they might be siblings. The book will be released in December.
What they're saying: "I like writing about women because, as a great reader growing up, I remember that most of the books that even were about women were written by men," Santiago tells Axios Latino. "Their lives have been covered, you know, it's just been centuries of their stories. Ours are really rather new."
- "I'm excited for nuestra gente and others to find these works now and find a common thread between their own lives and these stories that until really quite recently you could not find anywhere," she adds.
- "I hope that the growing success of these books makes it possible for some other young women from Caribbean literature and Latino literature that have the talent and stories and las ganas to keep doing it despite the obstacles we all face" in publishing, Santiago offers.
Other books in this genre that have been recently released include:
- Ingrid Rojas Contreras' memoir from last summer, the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Man Who Could Move Clouds," written after a bout of amnesia led the author to dig into her roots and mystical relatives.
- Kali Fajardo-Anstine's debut 2022 novel "Woman of Light" recounts generations of an Indigenous Latino family in 19th- and early 20th-century Colorado.
- Isabel Allende's "The Wind Knows My Name," which was published this month, centers on immigration and family separation.
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