April, a young mother living in a house of unspoken secrets and constant arguments, copes by numbing herself—until a sudden urge sends her buying a one-way bus ticket and walking away. Her ten-day escape into wilderness and uncertainty becomes an intense, sometimes dangerous search for herself, a reckoning with desire, grief, and the patterns that bind her family. Told as a letter to her daughter, the novel is a lyrical, sharp account of a woman learning what freedom and responsibility might mean.

In 1933 Buenos Aires, a shipment of nineteen Amazonian people — and an unexpected sloth — arrive to populate a proposed Ethnographic Theme Park. The sloth’s eerie telepathic ability draws the attention of officials, sparking secrecy, bureaucratic maneuvering, and the creation of a National Telepathy Commission. The novel follows the clash between spectacle and power as the city’s elite manipulate people and truth, told with dark humor and surreal inventiveness.

In 1889 Paris, doctor Aurora Montalban Wright runs an underground women’s clinic and accepts protection from Apollo César Sinclair Robles, the newly anointed Duke of Annan. Their pragmatic arrangement grows into a complicated attraction as Aurora fiercely guards her independence and Apollo navigates his public role. When a threat from their past forces them away to his villa on the French Riviera, they must confront whether their relationship can survive the risks and expectations around them.

Jazmina Barrera digs through archives and fragments to sketch the life of Mexican writer Elena Garro, confronting gaps and contradictions that resist a tidy portrait. The book presents Garro as a restless artist—a writer associated with magical realism, a dancer and divination devotee, an activist and complicated partner and mother—while situating her life within Mexico City’s social and cultural history and reflecting on the limits of biography.

Sofía, a freedwoman born into slavery, arrives at the island of Isla Bestia to find her twin brother and encounters the intoxicating, otherworldly Carnaval de Bestias. As she follows whispers of her Taike’ri heritage through the carnival’s performances and secrets, she must confront those who profit from her people and resist a growing, uncanny pull that threatens to consume her.

Alligator Tears is a darkly comic memoir-in-essays in which Edgar Gomez recounts growing up and scraping by in Florida—navigating poverty, low-wage work, risky hustles, and the bonds of queer Latinx friendship. Using the image of running in zigzags to evade danger, he examines the hollowness of the American Dream while searching for dignity, love, and community.

In 1999 New York, best friends Sal and Charo struggle to keep their dreams alive: Sal, a bookish science lover haunted by his past in Santo Domingo, and Charo, a young mother trapped in a controlling relationship and a dead-end job. When Sal finds connection in a vibrant queer social circle, both their worlds expand and force them to confront their identities, pasts, and what they owe to themselves and to each other. The novel explores migration, belonging, and the ways friendship can become a chosen home.

A raw, lyrical coming-of-age memoir that traces a young Puerto Rican girl’s turbulent upbringing in working-class neighborhoods marked by violence, addiction, and poverty, following her sexual awakenings, fraught family bonds, brushes with the foster system, and the slow, stubborn work of claiming identity and belonging; vivid scenes and reflective prose show how language, memory, trauma, and resilience shape her life and the fierce, fragile relationships that sustain her.