Assorted

J.K. Rowling

A story you likely already know, which does a lot of the comprehension work for you while you focus on the language.

John Green

The Spanish edition of The Fault in Our Stars -- contemporary, conversational prose and a fast-moving plot.

Sandra Cisneros

Short vignettes narrated by a young girl in Chicago -- brief chapters, plain language, often sold in bilingual editions.

Pablo Neruda

Short, famous love poems -- read one at a time rather than cover to cover, and a good way to work on rhythm and sound.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Short, aching Romantic-era poems paired with the eerie legends that made Bécquer one of Spain's most quoted poets.

Pablo Neruda

An epic poem cycle covering the history, land, and people of Latin America, from before the conquest to Neruda's own century.

César Vallejo

A jagged, experimental collection that broke from traditional Spanish verse and reshaped what Latin American poetry could sound like.

Rafael Alberti

A young poet's homesick poems for the sea, written while he was landlocked in Madrid.

Rubén Darío

The book that made Darío the father of Spanish-language literary modernism, full of swans, princesses, and musical language.

Federico García Lorca

Eighteen ballads steeped in Andalusian gypsy culture, blending folk tradition with Lorca's own strange, vivid imagery.

Gabriela Mistral

The Chilean poet's first major collection, written out of grief, exploring motherhood, loss, and rural life.

José Martí

Simple, direct verses by the Cuban independence hero, some of which later became the lyrics to "Guantanamera."

Rubén Darío

The short story and poetry collection that first announced Spanish American modernism to the literary world.

Octavio Paz

A single long poem, 584 lines built on the circular Aztec calendar, moving through love, time, and identity.

Oliverio Girondo

A playful, unconventional mix of prose poems, calligrams, and free verse from one of Argentina's great avant-garde poets.

Jorge Luis Borges

A collection gathering poems from across Borges's life, circling back often to mirrors, labyrinths, and time.

Elvira Lindo

A funny, very readable series narrated by a wisecracking kid from Madrid -- genuinely popular with native child readers, and forgiving for learners too.

Simone Ortega

A beloved, best-selling Spanish cookbook -- if you'd rather read for a hobby than a plot, recipes are short, repetitive, and full of everyday vocabulary.

Dolores Redondo

A detective returns to her hometown in the Basque Country to hunt a killer staging deaths like old local legends.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

A Mexican woman flees to Spain after her drug-trafficker boyfriend is killed, and builds her own criminal empire from nothing.

Agatha Christie

Ten strangers are lured to an island and killed off one by one, in the bestselling mystery novel of all time.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A struggling writer in 1920s Barcelona takes a strange commission from a mysterious publisher, in this prequel to La sombra del viento.

Javier Castillo

An FBI agent investigates a young girl's disappearance on Thanksgiving in Manhattan, in a fast, twist-heavy thriller.

Paula Hawkins

A woman who watches a couple from her daily train ride gets pulled into their disappearance and starts to doubt her own memory.

Torcuato Luca de Tena

A woman checks into a psychiatric hospital to investigate a death, and the reader is never quite sure if she's sane.

Thomas Harris

A young FBI trainee consults an imprisoned cannibal psychiatrist to catch a serial killer skinning his victims.

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Barcelona detective Pepe Carvalho investigates the murder of a wealthy businessman found dead in a working-class housing block.

Patrick Rothfuss

A legendary figure living in hiding tells the true story of his rise from orphan to wizard to legend.

George R.R. Martin

Noble houses scheme for the throne of a fractured kingdom while an ancient threat gathers beyond a wall of ice.

Michael Ende

A lonely boy discovers a book that pulls him physically into the dying fantasy world he's reading about.

J.R.R. Tolkien

A comfort-loving hobbit is talked into joining a band of dwarves on a quest to reclaim treasure guarded by a dragon.

Ray Bradbury

In a future where books are illegal, a fireman whose job is burning them starts to wonder what's in the ones he destroys.

George Orwell

A low-level bureaucrat in a totalitarian state where even thoughts are policed begins to question everything he's been told.

Aldous Huxley

A future society engineers happiness through genetic design and constant pleasure, until one man wants something more.

Isaac Asimov

A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and sets up a colony meant to shorten the coming dark age.

Frank Herbert

A duke's son is thrust into a desert planet's politics, religion, and rebellion after his family is betrayed.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

A fugitive hiding on a remote island falls for a woman who may be part of a strange machine repeating the same days forever.

Laura Gallego

Two teenagers are pulled from Earth into a magical world under threat from a race of shape-shifting dragons.

H.G. Wells

Martians land in the English countryside and begin a methodical invasion, told from the ground by one ordinary survivor.

Jane Austen

A sharp-tongued young woman and a proud, wealthy landowner slowly work past their first bad impressions of each other.

Jane Austen

A quieter, more mature Austen novel following Anne Elliot and a second chance at love with the naval captain she once refused, told with gentle irony.

Jane Austen

A comedy of manners about a well-meaning matchmaker who misreads everyone's hearts, including her own, before arriving at genuine self-knowledge and love.

Charlotte Brontë

A governess of strong moral conviction navigates hardship, an unconventional employer, and her own principles on the path to a hard-won, chaste love.

Louisa May Alcott

The beloved story of the four March sisters growing up together, with gentle romantic subplots woven into a warm family portrait.

José Mármol

A romantic historical novel set during Argentina's Rosas dictatorship, pairing a chaste, doomed love story with political intrigue and danger.

Georgette Heyer

A witty Regency romance in which a practical young woman seeking to launch her siblings in society unexpectedly wins the heart of a jaded aristocrat.

Janette Oke

The first book in a well-known clean, faith-inflected pioneer romance series, following a young widow who agrees to marry a stranger for practical reasons and slowly falls in love.

John Boyne

The son of a Nazi commandant befriends a boy on the other side of the camp fence, not understanding what the fence means.

Markus Zusak

A foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to survive, narrated by Death, who can't stop noticing her.

Noah Gordon

An orphaned boy in 11th-century England disguises himself as a Jew to study medicine in Persia under a legendary healer.

Umberto Eco

A Franciscan friar investigates a string of deaths in a medieval Italian monastery hiding a forbidden book.

Benito Pérez Galdós

A teenage sailor lives through the disastrous Battle of Trafalgar aboard a Spanish warship, in the first of Galdós's historical Episodios.

Eduardo Mendoza

A lawyer gets tangled in industrial sabotage and political violence in Barcelona just before World War I.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

During Napoleon's siege of Cádiz, a police detective hunts a killer whose murders always land where French artillery is about to strike.

Yuval Noah Harari

A sweeping account of how Homo sapiens went from an unremarkable ape to the species running the planet.

Ana Frank

A teenage girl's diary of two years spent hiding from the Nazis in a sealed-off attic in Amsterdam.

Viktor Frankl

A psychiatrist who survived Nazi concentration camps lays out how he found meaning even there.

Malala Yousafzai

A Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for going to school tells how she got back up and kept speaking out.

Dale Carnegie

A decades-old, still-popular guide to handling people, winning them over, and getting along better at work and at home.

Walter Isaacson

The authorized biography of Apple's co-founder, built on dozens of interviews Jobs gave the author before he died.

Gabriel García Márquez

The first volume of García Márquez's own life story, from his childhood in Colombia to the start of his writing career.

Irene Vallejo

An essay-memoir hybrid tracing the history of books and libraries back to the ancient world, and why we still need them.

Eckhart Tolle

A guide to spiritual practice built around a single idea: most suffering comes from living in the past or future instead of now.

Bill Bryson

A layperson's tour through physics, chemistry, biology, and geology, explaining what we know about the universe and how we found out.

Yuval Noah Harari

A follow-up to Sapiens that looks ahead to what might replace disease, famine, and war as humanity's next challenges.

Charles Duhigg

A look at the science of habit formation, using stories from companies, athletes, and addicts to explain how habits change.

Roald Dahl

A poor boy wins a golden ticket to tour the strangest, most wonderful chocolate factory in the world.

Roald Dahl

A brilliant little girl with neglectful parents and a cruel headmistress discovers she has a strange power of her own.

Michael Ende

A strange little girl who's a gifted listener takes on the gray men who are quietly stealing everyone's time.

Astrid Lindgren

The strongest girl in the world lives alone with a horse and a monkey and does exactly as she pleases.

Jeff Kinney

A middle-schooler's illustrated diary of surviving school, family, and his own bad decisions.

Roald Dahl

A boy and his grandmother uncover a secret society of witches plotting to turn every child in England into a mouse.

Roald Dahl

An orphaned boy escapes his awful aunts inside a giant peach, crewed by a group of oversized talking insects.

Lewis Carroll

A girl follows a white rabbit down a hole into a nonsensical world of talking creatures and mad tea parties.

Johanna Spyri

A young orphan sent to live with her gruff grandfather in the Swiss Alps wins him over and falls in love with mountain life.

René Goscinny

A mischievous French schoolboy narrates his everyday scrapes with friends, teachers, and his own bad ideas.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

A talkative orphan girl arrives by mistake at a farm that wanted a boy, and wins over the whole town anyway.

J.M. Barrie

A boy who refuses to grow up brings three London children to Neverland for adventures with pirates and fairies.

Veronica Roth

In a future Chicago sorted into rigid personality factions, a teenage girl discovers she doesn't fit into just one.

Suzanne Collins

A girl volunteers to fight to the death in a televised arena to save her little sister from being chosen instead.

Stephenie Meyer

A teenage girl moves to a rainy small town and falls for a classmate who turns out to be a vampire.

Rick Riordan

A boy with dyslexia and ADHD learns he's the son of a Greek god and gets blamed for a theft he didn't commit.

Cassandra Clare

A New York teenager discovers she can see demon-hunters invisible to normal people, and that she's connected to their world.

Mark Haddon

A teenage boy who thinks in patterns investigates who killed the neighbor's dog, and uncovers a family secret instead.

Leigh Bardugo

A criminal prodigy assembles a crew of six outcasts to pull off a heist no one has ever survived.

Ernest Cline

A teenager in a bleak future spends his time in a vast virtual reality, hunting an Easter egg that will make him rich.

Kiera Cass

Thirty-five girls compete for a prince's hand in a televised contest that's really a way out of a bleak future.

Héctor García y Francesc Miralles

A look at the Japanese idea of "reason for being," built around interviews with the world's longest-lived villagers.

Marie Kondo

A room-by-room method for deciding what to keep and what to let go of, organized around what "sparks joy."

Elizabeth Gilbert

A woman rebuilding her life after divorce spends a year eating in Italy, praying in India, and finding balance in Bali.

Robin Sharma

A burned-out, wealthy lawyer gives up everything to study with monks in the Himalayas, and comes back with lessons for living better.

Yotam Ottolenghi

A cookbook built around fewer ingredients and less time, without giving up the bold, vegetable-forward flavors Ottolenghi is known for.

Karlos Arguiñano

Straightforward, everyday recipes from Spain's most familiar TV chef.

Yotam Ottolenghi y Sami Tamimi

A cookbook exploring the shared food culture of Jerusalem, from two authors who grew up on opposite sides of the city.

Miguel Ruiz

A short book of personal-code rules, drawn from Toltec wisdom, for living with more honesty and less self-inflicted suffering.

Robert Kiyosaki

A personal-finance classic contrasting two father figures' very different ideas about money, work, and building wealth.

James Clear

A practical guide to building good habits and breaking bad ones through small, compounding changes.

T. Harv Eker

A book arguing that people's beliefs about money, formed early in life, quietly shape whether they ever get rich.

Marjane Satrapi

A black-and-white graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq.

Art Spiegelman

A cartoonist tells his father's story of surviving the Holocaust, drawing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

Quino

A precocious six-year-old Argentine girl worries about war, politics, and soup, in one of Latin America's most beloved comic strips.

Francisco Ibáñez

Two bumbling secret agents botch increasingly chaotic missions, in one of Spain's longest-running comic series.

Héctor Germán Oesterheld y Francisco Solano López

A deadly glowing snow falls on Buenos Aires, and a small group of survivors fights to figure out what's happening and who's behind it.

René Goscinny y Albert Uderzo

A small Gaulish village holds out against the entire Roman Empire, thanks to a magic potion and one clever, mustached warrior.

Antonio Altarriba y Kim

A son pieces together his father's life, from the Spanish Civil War through exile and old age, after his father's suicide.

Hergé

Reporter Tintín and his dog Snowy chase a set of clues hidden in three model ships, leading toward a pirate's sunken treasure.

Alan Moore y David Lloyd

A masked anarchist wages a personal war against a fascist government that's taken over Britain.

José Escobar

Twin brothers get into constant trouble at home and at their strict boarding school, in a classic of Spanish comics.

Benito Pérez Galdós

Two very different women, one from the streets and one from the bourgeoisie, are bound together by their love for the same unreliable man.

Miguel de Unamuno

A directionless young man falls for a woman who doesn't love him back, in a strange novel where the character eventually confronts his own author.

Anónimo

A poor boy survives by serving a string of terrible masters, in the short novel that basically invented the picaresque genre.

Rómulo Gallegos

A ruthless landowner on the Venezuelan plains meets her match in a lawyer trying to bring order and civilization to her territory.

Jorge Isaacs

A young man falls in love with his adopted sister on a Colombian plantation, in one of the great Romantic novels of Latin America.

Pío Baroja

A disillusioned medical student drifts through turn-of-the-century Spain, questioning science, love, and what any of it is for.

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

A farming family that moves onto cursed, empty land in rural Valencia faces the fury of neighbors who won't forgive them for it.

Benito Pérez Galdós

A poor, plain village girl guides a blind young man through the countryside, and dreads what will happen once he can see.

Juan Rulfo

Short, spare stories of rural Mexican poverty and violence, from the writer who inspired a generation of Latin American novelists.

Horacio Quiroga

Dark, tightly told stories set in the jungles of Argentina and Uruguay, often ending in accident or madness.

José Ortega y Gasset

An influential essay arguing that mass society was producing a new, dangerous kind of person: entitled, uncultured, and everywhere.

José Enrique Rodó

A philosophy teacher's farewell speech to his students becomes an essay about idealism, culture, and Latin America's place in the world.

Gabriel García Márquez

Twelve short stories about Latin Americans adrift in Europe, written and polished by García Márquez over almost two decades.

Esteban Echeverría

A brutal short story set in a Buenos Aires slaughterhouse, read as an allegory against 19th-century dictatorship -- often called Argentina's first short story.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro

A collected volume of the Peruvian writer's short fiction about ordinary people getting by in Lima's poorer neighborhoods.

José Ortega y Gasset

The philosopher's first book, using Don Quijote as a jumping-off point for essays on Spanish culture and identity.

Juan José Arreola

Short, sharp, often funny fables and fictions from one of Mexico's most inventive short-story writers.

Octavio Paz

An essay on what poetry actually is and does, and why human beings keep making it.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Part biography, part political essay, using a brutal Argentine warlord's life to argue for civilization over rural barbarism.

Julio Cortázar

Playful, surreal short prose pieces sorting the world into cronopios, famas, and esperanzas -- three very different kinds of people.