Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: No Prompt

Since there is still no prompt this week, I will be featuring works of Latin American literature. This aligns with my literary journey across the American continent. Without ado, here are some works of Latin American literature I am looking forward to.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: In the Time of the Butterflies
Author: Julia Alvarez
Publisher: PLUME
Publishing Date: August 1995 (1994)
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: 

They were the four Mirabal sisters – symbols of defiant hope in a country shadowed by dictatorship and despair. They sacrificed their safe and comfortable lives in the name of freedom. They were Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies,” and in this extraordinary novel Patria, Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Dedé speak across the decades to tell their own stories – from tales of hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture – and describe the everyday horrors of life under the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Now through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in a warm, brilliant, and heartbreaking novel that makes a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression.

Title: Where the Air is Clear
Author: Carlos Fuentes
Translator (from Spanish): Sam Hileman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Publishing Date: 1985
No. of Pages: 376

Synopsis: 

My name is Ixca Cienfuegos. I was born and I live in Mexico City. Which is not so grave: in Mexico City there is never tragedy but only outrage. Thus begins Carlos Fuentes’s first novel, unfolding a panorama in which many people’s lives depend on the fact that they live in today’s Mexico City, where the air is clear and yet filled with the old gods and devils still struggling to overcome the new, where a long and bloody revolution is still being fought and paid for in flesh. The vividness of Fuentes’s characters and the country that is theirs has made critics claim this as his best novel. It is unquestionably among the finest works of literature to be produced in the Western Hemisphere.

Title: The Skating Rink
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator (from Spanish): Chris Andrews
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2009 (1993)
No. of Pages: 182

Synopsis: 

Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona.

The story revolves around the beautiful figure-skating champion Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion outside of town. What he doesn’t tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds, but such a betrayal is only the beginning, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.

Told in short, suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators – a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered yet still romantic itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur – The Skating Rink is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.

Title: Lovesick
Author: Ángeles Mastretta
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Sayers Peden
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 292

Synopsis: 

A bestseller throughout Latin America, Lovesick is the story of a passion interwoven with the history of a nation, a war, and a family. Emilia Sauri is torn between her love for her childhood playmate, Daniel Cuenca, who runs off to join the Mexican Revolution, and her desire to become a doctor. Her professional calling leads her to Antonio Zavalza, a physician whose only audacity is to desire peace in the midst of a civil war.

With an assured hand and a crystalline touch, reminiscent of the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende, Ángeles Mastretta presents the vivid portrait of a woman both fragile and bold, who enters the new century shedding the bonds and the prejudices of previous generations. As Emilia must sort through the affairs of her heart, so too must she confront the fate history presents – a nation wracked by years of war and society awakening to the tumult of the twentieth century, and the place for a woman of many passions.

Title: Home is the Sailor
Author: Jorge Amado
Translator (from Portuguese): Harriet De Onis
Publisher: Collins Harvill
Publishing Date: 1990 (1961)
No. of Pages: 298

Synopsis: 

The sleepy Brazilian beach resort of Periperi needs a hero. As if in answer to their call, Captain Vasco Moscosco de Aragão (newly retired) arrives and soon has the townspeople enthralled with his tales of ocean-going daring and romance. Only his rival, Chico Pacheco, delves into the captain’s past and discovers that he has never in his life sailed beyond the harbour bar. But just as Vasco is about to be unmasked, the Ita limps into port with her flag at half mast and her captain dead at the wheel. Pressed into service, Vasco goes to meet his destiny and so begins an adventure in love and seamanship that surpasses even his wildest fantasies.