Books from Mexico

What makes someone a mother—and what happens when motherhood looks nothing like we imagined? Laura has made a firm decision never to have children, even undergoing sterilisation to protect the life she has chosen. Her friend Alina, meanwhile, finds herself drawn towards motherhood. When Alina’s pregnancy takes an unexpected turn, both women are forced to confront the limits of love, independence, and their ideas about what it means to care for another person. As their lives become intertwined with the lives of vulnerable children, the two women discover that love can be inseparable from fear, grief, and uncertainty. With remarkable tenderness and honesty, Guadalupe Nettel challenges the idealised image of maternal instinct, exploring the complicated emotions women are rarely encouraged to admit. Intimate and quietly devastating, Still Born is a moving portrait of friendship, chosen family, and the many forms that caregiving can take. Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, it asks whether love means protecting someone from suffering—or learning how to live alongside it.

Lost Children Archive follows a family of four on a road trip from New York to the American Southwest. The parents, both documentarians, are working on separate projects: the father is recording the sounds of disappearing Apache communities, while the mother is researching the stories of migrant children who have crossed the US–Mexico border alone. As they travel through the vast American landscape, their professional interests begin to shape the family’s conversations and expose growing tensions in their marriage. Through the perspectives of the mother and, later, her young son, the novel explores the distance between adults and children, the limits of storytelling, and the moral responsibility of witnessing other people’s suffering. The family’s journey becomes intertwined with the experiences of two migrant children whose fate remains uncertain. Blending documentary fragments, photographs, maps, and literary references, Valeria Luiselli examines migration, displacement, and the ways families preserve or lose their histories. The novel asks how we can listen to stories of suffering without reducing them to distant headlines.

Caramelo follows Lala Reyes, a Mexican American girl who recounts her family’s history through generations of memories, stories, and secrets. During annual summer trips from Chicago to Mexico City, Lala becomes fascinated by her grandmother, Soledad, whose life story reveals the complexities of family relationships, cultural traditions, and personal sacrifice. As Lala pieces together her family’s past, she discovers that memory is often unreliable and that different generations tell conflicting versions of the same events. Moving between Mexico and the United States, the novel explores immigration, identity, love, and the tensions between tradition and independence. Through humor, vivid storytelling, and a rich blend of English and Spanish, Sandra Cisneros celebrates the complexities of Mexican American heritage while examining how family stories shape our understanding of ourselves and where we belong.