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Recommended historical fiction books (10)
Travel the world without leaving your chair. If you are into historical fiction here are some historical fiction books from Mexico for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.

1.

Como agua para chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel ES

0 Ratings
Description:
Mexico zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Als jüngste von drei Töchtern darf Tita nicht heiraten, sondern muss bis zu deren Tod ihre Mutter versorgen. Pedro, ihre grosse Liebe, heiratet die ältere Schwester, um wenigstens in ihrer Nähe zu bleiben. Ihren Gefühlen kann sie allein in der Küche Ausdruck geben: die Gäste erleben beim Essen nach, was Tita beim Kochen empfunden hat - mit zum Teil grotesken Folgen.

2.

Daughter of Fire : A Novel by Sofia Robleda EN

Rating: 4 (1 vote)
Description:
For a young woman coming of age in sixteenth-century Guatemala, safeguarding her people's legacy is a dangerous pursuit in a mystical, empowering, and richly imagined historical novel. Catalina de Cerrato is being raised by her widowed father, Don Alonso, in 1551 Guatemala, scarcely thirty years since the Spanish invasion. A ruling member of the oppressive Spanish hierarchy, Don Alonso holds sway over the newly relegated lower class of Indigenous communities. Fiercely independent, Catalina struggles to honor her father and her late mother, a Maya noblewoman to whom Catalina made a vow that onl... continue

3.

Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea EN

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Description:
An Instant New York Times Bestseller This “powerful, uplifting, and deeply personal novel” (Kristin Hannah, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Four Winds), at once “a heart-wrenching wartime drama” (Christina Baker Kline, #1 NYT bestselling author of Orphan Train) and “a moving and graceful tribute to heroic women” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), asks the question: What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever? In the tradition of The Nightingale and Transcription, this is a searing epic based on the magnificent and true story of courageous Red Cross women. “U... continue

4.

Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue EN

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Description:
Selected as a Guardian best book of 2016 A funny and mind-bending novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century, told over the course of one dazzling tennis match A brutal tennis match in Rome. Two formidable opponents: the wild Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. Galileo, Saint Matthew and Mary Magdalene heckle from the sidelines. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ... continue

5.

Swift as Desire by Laura Esquivel EN

Rating: 4 (1 vote)
Description:
As the millions of fans of Like Water for Chocolate know, Laura Esquivel is a romanticist whose novels explore the power of love and the truths of the human heart. She returns to those themes in Swift as Desire, the story of a loving and passionate man who has the gift of bringing happiness to everyone except his own wife. The hero of this novel is Júbilo Chi, a telegraph operator who is born with the ability to “hear” people’s true feelings and respond to their most intimate, unspoken desires. His life changes forever the day he falls deeply and irrevocably in love with Lucha, the beautiful d... continue

6.

The Forgery by Ave Barrera EN

Rating: 5 (2 votes)
Description:
An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor.

7.

The Murmur of Bees by Sofía Segovia EN

Rating: 4 (3 votes)
Description:
From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel--her first to be translated into English--about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution. From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. A... continue

8.

The Squatter and the Don by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton EN

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Description:
The Squatter and the Don, originally published in San Francisco in 1885, is the first fictional narrative written and published in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population that, despite being granted the full rights of citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, was, by 1860, a subordinated and marginalized national minority.

9.

Two Novels of Mexico : The Flies. The Bosses by Mariano Azuela EN

Rating: 4 (1 vote)
Description:
-- "The Bosses" is set during the presidency (1911 to 1913) of Francisco Madero (1873-1913), the successful revolutionary who has ousted the previous president. It focuses on unscrupulous political "caicques" (bosses) who manage to ruin two men: Don Juanito, an honest businessman, is robbed of his livelihood, and Rodriguez, an idealistic clerk, is killed for criticizing the bosses.-- adapted from "The Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature", page 89, accessed online at Google Books, 9-15-17.

10.

You Dreamed of Empires : A Novel by Álvaro Enrigue EN

Rating: 5 (1 vote)
Description:
“Short, strange, spiky and sublime… [Enrigue] is clearly a major talent.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story. One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures. Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former ... continue