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Armchair Travel
A select list of books set in
Latin &
South America
Australia & New Zealand
ARGENTINA
Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Fantasy
A collection of 79 selections gives brief magical
visions of the world culled from works spanning the past three centuries.
Borges offers the keynote tale.
COLOMBIA
Gabriel Garacia Marquez One Hundred Years of
Solitude
Translated into more the two dozen languages, this novel
of love and loss in the village of Macondo introduced Latin American literature
to a world-wide readership.
CHILE
Isabel Allende House of the Spirits
Set during the early turn of the 20th century,
this multi-generational story is a touching tale where the depth of familial
bonds proves to be the essential force in life.
Isabel Allende Daughter of Fortune
Set in the mid-1900’s this novel follows the fortunes of
Eliza Sommers, Chilean by birth but adopted by a spinster, Rose Sommers, and her
bachelor brother, Jeremy, after she is abandoned on the doorstep.
Pablo Neruda The Essential Neruda: Selected
Poems
This collection of Neruda’s most essential poems is a
splendid way to meet Neruda or revisit him passionately again and again.
CUBA
Carlos Eire Waiting for Snow in Havana:
Confessions of a Cuban Boy
Eire’s complex, introspective memoir begins the day his
world changed: when Castro came to power and his family was forced into exile.
With child-like vision he narrates all the changes that follow.
DOMINICAN
REPUBLIC
Julia Alvarez In the Time of Butterflies
A tale of courage and sisterhood set in the Dominican
Republic during the rise of the Trujillo dictatorship.
Julia Alvarez How the Garcia Girls Lost Their
Accents
A sensitive story of four sisters who must adjust to life
in America after having to flee from the Dominican Republic
HAITI
Diane Wolkstein The Magic Orange Tree: and
Other Haitian Folktales
A collection of folktales gathered by the author in Haiti
with comments on Haitian life.
MEXICO
Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate:
A Novel in Monthly Installments with Romances, and Home Remedies
Mexican screenwriter Esquivel’s account of thwarted love
in turn of the century Mexico is brought to the kitchen where the frustrated
Tita takes refuge.
Carlos Fuentes The Orange Tree
In these five novellas of historical fiction Fuentes
delves into the Hispanic world’s past, revealing with imaginative insight the
clash between the old and new worlds.
PARAGUAY
Augusto Antonio Roa Bastos I the Supreme
This modern Latin American classic is the imagined life
of the Supremo, the last royal governor voted dictator for life.
PERU
Mario Vargas Llosa Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter
The aspiring writer Marito Varguitas falls in love with
Julia, the divorcee of his Uncle Lucho.
PUERTO RICO
Esmeralda Santiago When I Was Puerto Rican
Santiago artfully recounts her childhood in rural Puerto
Rico and her teenage years in New York City.
AUSTRALIA
Jon Cleary The Sundowners
Set in the Australian back country, this is the story
of a nomadic family and a boy’s first step into manhood.
Robyn Davidson Tracks
Tracks is the hilarious account of a young woman’s
odyssey through the deserts of Australia with her dog and four camels as her
only companions.
Janette Turner Hospital Borderline
A refrigerated meat truck is stopped by immigration
officials at the Canadian border; slowly freezing to death are a dozen desperate
Salvadorian refugees. So begins a Hitchcockian world of conspiracy and
intrigue. Written by an Australian writer, this book crosses cultural barriers.
Thomas Keneally Office of Innocence
The prolific Australian author who brought us
Schindler’s List offers a profound novel about one young priest’s crisis of
faith in Sydney during World War II.
Colleen McCullough Morgan’s Run
In this intricately researched epic of 18th
century England’s colonization of Australia, Richard Morgan becomes one of the
first British convicts to be sent to the rugged new prison colony of Botany Bay.
David Malouf The Conversations at Curlow Creek
Having grown up in the same household but under very
different circumstances, two foster-brothers respond to fate in radically
different ways, with radically different results.
NEW ZEALAND
Keri Hulme The Bone People
This winner of the 1985 Booker Prize by a New Zealander
of Maori and Scottish-English ancestry focuses on three people locked together
in animosity and love.
Witi Ihimaera The Whale Rider
Eight year old Kahu saves her Maori tribe when she
reveals that she has the whale rider’s ancient gift of communicating with
whales.
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