Books from Bolivia

Affections is a short novel by Rodrigo Hasbún, drawn from the real history of Hans Ertl, a German cinematographer who worked with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. After the Second World War, Ertl and his family relocated to Bolivia to begin a new life. The novel follows the family across the 1950s and 1960s, a period of both political optimism and upheaval in South America. Hans remains driven by grand, reckless ambitions, and at one point leads two of his daughters on an expedition into the Amazon in search of the legendary lost Inca city of Paititi. The venture ends badly.

The story traces each family member along a separate path. Hans pursues enormous projects that tend toward spectacular failure. His daughter Monika, who shares his restless temperament, eventually joins Bolivian Marxist guerrillas and becomes known in connection with the legacy of Che Guevara. His wife and two younger daughters are left to manage the damage created by Hans and Monika's choices.

Hasbún uses multiple voices and perspectives to chart how the family gradually comes apart. The title points to the bonds that once held the Ertls together and the slow erosion of those bonds under the pressure of ego, ideology, and distance.

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Norte follows three separate individuals heading north across the Mexico-US border, each making the crossing alone and unaware of the others. Their paths do not overlap at first, but the novel gradually draws connections between them as their experiences begin to intersect. Among the figures who populate their stories are a young serial killer, a waitress who is also a graphic novelist alongside her lover and former professor, and an outsider artist confined to a mental institution.

Edmundo Paz Soldán, a Bolivian writer, constructs the book from multiple voices and fragmented perspectives. The structure mirrors the disorientation of border crossing itself, layering distinct narrators whose accounts slowly converge. Paz Soldán has been identified as part of a newer generation of Latin American authors who work outside the tradition of magical realism, focusing instead on political, economic, and historical conditions. Norte reflects that approach, grounding its fiction in the concrete tensions surrounding migration, violence, and the dividing line between two countries.

The novel shifts between settings on both sides of the border, moving through landscapes shaped by institutional confinement, precarious labor, and creative expression under pressure. Its characters occupy positions of vulnerability, each carrying separate reasons for heading north and separate consequences for arriving.

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Adela Zamudio (1854-1928) was a self-taught Bolivian writer and educator who became one of the country's most prominent literary figures. This bilingual collection, translated from Spanish by Lynette Yetter, gathers poetry and prose that had largely remained unavailable in English. Zamudio wrote during a period when women in Bolivia had limited access to formal education, and she became an outspoken advocate for women's rights and for Indigenous communities.

The book includes several contextual chapters alongside the translated works. An introduction by Bolivian scholar Virginia Ayllón outlines Zamudio's biography and the cultural setting she wrote within. Her poetry addressed gender inequality with pointed irony, and some of her writing openly celebrated lesbian love. At some point during her lifetime, the President of Bolivia honored her with gold laurel leaves in recognition of her cultural contributions.

Zamudio's work spans lyric verse and prose pieces that mix personal observation with social criticism. The bilingual format places Spanish originals alongside their English translations, allowing readers familiar with either language to compare the two. As the first English-language collection dedicated to her writings, this volume serves as a starting point for encountering her work outside the Spanish-speaking world.

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Between November 1966 and October 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara led a guerrilla campaign in Bolivia and kept a daily written record of it. His entries track the fight against the country's military government and the larger goal behind it: uniting workers and farmers across the continent in one revolutionary movement that could bring socialist change to South America.

Born in Argentina in 1928, Guevara finished medical school in 1953 and set out to travel the Americas. In Guatemala during 1954 he entered political struggle, backing President Jacobo Arbenz while the CIA worked to bring that elected government down. He escaped to Mexico, joined Fidel Castro's July 26 Movement, and sailed to Cuba on the yacht Granma in December 1956 as the troop's doctor.

Batista fell on January 1, 1959, and Guevara became a central figure in the new government, serving as minister of industry and heading the national bank. He resigned his posts in early 1965 and left Cuba, going first to the Congo. This edition adds excerpts from diaries and accounts by other combatants, including My Campaign with Che by Bolivian leader Inti Peredo, in English for the first time.

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The Latin American Cookbook by Virgilio Martínez gathers more than 600 recipes from twenty countries across Central and South America, plus the Caribbean coast. The collection spans Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Martínez, a Peruvian chef, organizes a geography of cooking shaped by indigenous traditions alongside European, Asian, and other influences that arrived over centuries of migration and trade.

Alongside widely recognized dishes such as empanadas, tamales, arepas, tortillas, quesadillas, and tacos, the book includes lesser-known preparations like Chilean disco fries, Nicaraguan squash stew, and Ecuadorian Easter soup. The recipes are written for home cooks rather than professional kitchens, and the range of dishes reflects both everyday meals and seasonal or regional specialties.

The scope of the book treats Latin America as a single culinary landscape while still marking where individual recipes belong. Ingredients and techniques shift noticeably from the highlands of Bolivia and Peru to the tropical lowlands of Guyana and Suriname, and the collection maps those differences through specific dishes rather than broad generalizations.

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Set in a near-future Bolivia, Turing's Delirium follows Miguel Saenz, known by his codename Turing, a seasoned cryptanalyst working for a covert state agency called the Black Chamber. His job is to break codes and track threats to the government. His current assignment is to locate Kandinsky, a hacktivist figure leading digital attacks against both the Bolivian state and the transnational corporations operating in the country. Kandinsky's campaign is framed as part of a broader antiglobalization movement, and the Black Chamber considers it a serious security risk.

As Turing pursues Kandinsky through layers of encrypted communication and shifting alliances, he encounters murder, manipulation, and institutional secrecy. The trail forces him to reconsider his own role inside the Black Chamber and whether the work he has carried out over the years has served the purposes he assumed. The novel draws on themes of surveillance, political control, and the uneasy relationship between technology and state power.

Edmundo Paz Soldán, a Bolivian writer, sets the story in a version of Bolivia where digital infrastructure and political tension coexist with older patterns of government secrecy. The fictional Black Chamber takes its name from a term historically used for cryptanalysis offices in several countries.

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