The Best Latine Books of 2025

Ava is a divorced middle school teacher. Roman is a self-made and, somehow, ethical billionaire hotel owner. A chance meeting leads to a one night stand. But then Ava finds out that Roman is the best man in her cousin’s wedding, and she is the maid of honor. Roman is delighted and clears his schedule to accompany Ava to Puerto Rico to help organize the wedding. But Ava isn’t so sure. She’s feeling wounded from her divorce, pressure from her family, and unable to trust anything—even her own feelings. I am a former teacher and people pleaser, so I loved seeing Ava work through her complex emotions to get the fantasy romance she deserved! – Alison Doherty

A perfectly blended family drama with a past and present missing person’s mystery that sinks readers into a small town by the Salton Sea. I was equally invested in Mal and her family—from her mother blaming her for her sister’s disappearance when they were in high school to Mal keeping the father of her teen daughter’s identity a secret—and finding out what happened to the missing women, then and now. Throw in nightmares about a horse-headed woman, a politician brother aligned with the rich, and a race to find another missing person, and this atmospheric mystery is all-absorbing. Bonus: Victoria Villarreal is an excellent audiobook narrator. – Jamie Canaves

I named this a Best Book of 2025 So Far and had to bring it back for the finale, a collection of beautiful stories of self-discovery, activism, resistance, and survival from queer elders of color. These testimonies are a necessary record of lived experience and hard-won progress, a love letter to queer history, and a reminder of the gift it is to have living elders among us. The joy in each of these stories is what has stayed with me, a joy that persisted even in periods of profound struggle and loss. We hear all the time that joy is resistance; this is the kind of work that really drives that point home and gives me hope for a better future. -Vanessa Diaz

Pulling from Limón’s six published collections, these gorgeous poems unfold in chronological order fromLucky WrecktoThe Hurting Kind. Having read every in-print title by the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, I found myself electric with excitement to behold some of the prolific author’s new and new-to-me work. Revisiting familiar poems fed my bookish heart in myriad ways, and reading pieces fromThis Big Fake Worldand the final section for the first time is precisely why I open books—to connect, to learn, to feel awe. If you need a gift for yourself and for others, look into this exploration of dreams, grief, love, the ordinary, and the extraordinary. – Connie Pan

In 1990s Massachusetts, Mexican grad student Minerva is researching an obscure horror writer who attended the same university decades prior, and the unexplained disappearance of that writer’s roommate. The more she learns about both, the more parallels she sees with the unsettling stories her great-grandmother Alba told her about her life in 1900s Mexico, stories of witchcraft and an insidious evil that might now be lurking in the halls of this New England college. SMG stays spinning the genre roulette and going, “Yeah, I can do that.” And y’all, she did that, in deliciously creepy form. -Vanessa Diaz

With a focus on mother-daughter relationships, this is a deeply felt, layered generational drama and coming-of-age novel. Maricarmen’s life changes as a teen in Puerto Rico when her mom throws her out after overhearing her confess her love for a boy she was forbidden to date. Decades later, her daughter Nena finds herself in Miami trying to understand generational trauma. This was one of the very few 2025 releases that I was highly anticipating that actually delivered, and just like Díaz’s memoir, I felt this book inside my bones. Almarie Guerra does a fantastic job narrating the audiobook. – Jamie Canaves

Fantasy! Romance! Historical Fiction! Found family! Gorgeous art! Venessa Vida Kelley’s dreamy debutWhen the Tides Held the Moonhas something for everyone. Puerto Rican blacksmith Benny is tasked with building a giant glass tank. When he delivers it to the 1910s Coney Island carnival sideshow that commissioned it, he realizes it was constructed for a real merman captured from the East River. And when he falls in love with that merman, Benny realizes he’s constructed his prison and now must find a way to help him escape. The ensemble cast of “human curiosities” and Vida Kelley’s vivid illustrations make this story truly shine. – Susie Dumond