Books from Costa Rica

3 books from and about Costa Rica: what each is about, the plot, and a note from Professor Kogi.

Cooking in Costa Rica

Gloria Yeatman

Original language: English · Paperback · ISBN 978-1977812162

Moving to a new country means learning to navigate its markets, kitchens, and food vocabulary. Cooking in Costa Rica, by Gloria Yeatman, is a practical reference for English speakers who have relocated to Costa Rica and need to identify ingredients, utensils, and kitchen items in Costa Rican Spanish. The book combines an English-to-Spanish food dictionary with recipes and shopping guidance, addressing the specific gap between knowing a word in textbook Spanish and finding the actual product on a local shelf.

Yeatman, herself an expatriate living in Costa Rica and co-creator of the website Retire for Less in Costa Rica, built the guide from direct experience with the country's markets and grocery stores. Costa Rican Spanish carries its own regional vocabulary for produce, cuts of meat, and cooking tools, which can differ from the Spanish used in Mexico or Spain. The dictionary section of the book aims to cover these local terms rather than offering only standard translations.

The cookbook portion gives readers a way to put that vocabulary into practice with recipes suited to ingredients available in Costa Rica. The book functions as both a language tool and a kitchen companion for daily use.

Plot

When you move to a Spanish-speaking country like Costa Rica, it can be daunting to stock your kitchen and cook meals when you do not know the names of your ingredients in Spanish. And, even when you know the Spanish translation, it can be a challenge to find what you are looking for. Gloria Yeatman, Costa Rica expat, blogger, and co-creator of the popular website "Retire for Less in Costa Rica," has created a combination English/Spanish food dictionary, cookbook, shopping guide to make the transition easier.

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Happier Than A Billionaire

Nadine Pisani

Original language: English · Paperback · ISBN 978-1463536107

Nadine Pisani left her job in the United States and moved to Costa Rica with her husband, trading a familiar routine for an open-ended experiment in starting over. Happier Than A Billionaire is her account of that transition, written with a comic tone that focuses on the everyday friction of settling into a new country. Unreliable utilities, unexpected encounters with neighbors, and layers of bureaucracy fill the early chapters as the couple adjusts to conditions that guidebooks tend to gloss over.

Costa Rica is frequently cited in global happiness surveys, and Pisani uses her own experience to explore why that reputation exists alongside real inconveniences. The phrase Pura Vida, roughly meaning pure life, appears throughout Costa Rican daily speech as both a greeting and a loose philosophy of contentment. Pisani circles around this idea as she describes learning to accept a slower, less predictable pace. The book sits in a growing category of relocation memoirs, but its focus stays narrow and personal rather than instructional. Pisani writes about specific incidents rather than offering a how-to guide, keeping the story grounded in one couple's adjustment to a place that rewards patience more than planning.

Plot

In this humorous and witty account, Nadine Pisani shares what it is like to follow her dream of quitting her job and starting a new life under the sunny skies of Costa Rica. Along the way, she finds reliable utilities are not that reliable, quirky neighbors are unavoidable, and tackling red tape takes the strength of a linebacker. But with all its challenges, you'll learn why Costa Rica is ranked as one of the happiest places on earth—and you too may want to taste the Pura Vida lifestyle.

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Unica Looking at the Sea

Fernando Contreras Castro

Original language: Spanish · Paperback · ISBN 978-1944884291

Unica Looking at the Sea is a novel by Costa Rican writer Fernando Contreras Castro, set in and around the Río Azul sanitary landfill near San José, Costa Rica. The story centers on people who live and work among the waste of a modern city, building their lives in a place most residents prefer not to see. Through their daily reality, the novel examines what a consumer society discards and who is left to sort through it.

Contreras Castro uses the landfill as both a physical setting and a lens for social criticism. The characters who inhabit this space form bonds of solidarity and tenderness even under harsh conditions. The writing moves between sharp irony and moments of genuine care, drawing out contradictions between how a society presents itself and what it throws away. Rather than treating poverty as spectacle, the novel stays close to its characters and the concrete details of their surroundings.

The Río Azul landfill, which operated for decades east of San José, received much of the capital region's waste and became a point of public debate over environmental and social conditions. Contreras Castro's choice to anchor his fiction in this specific, real location gives the story a geographic weight that connects it directly to Costa Rican urban life.

Plot

Única Looking at the Sea, the first novel by the Costa Rican writer Fernando Contreras Castro, has immediately assumed a position of great importance in the history of Costa Rican literature. Beginning with space—the problematic and deeply referential space of the sanitary landfill at Río Azul—this work goes beyond the anecdotal to acquire the symbolic character and the critical capacity of great literary work. We can say that through this writer’s ingenuity garbage is turned into literature, with the garbage dump serving as the basis for an incisive critique of modern consumer culture. From within this grotesque, almost nonsensical, realism, moments of immense tenderness emerge, of solidarity and of human suffering. The subtle irony and sometimes cruel sarcasm recreate one of the cruelest realities in our society. —Amalia Chaverri

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More from Costa Rica

See the country page for Costa Rica for its map, facts and largest cities, or browse books from other countries.

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