September 15-October 15 is Latine Heritage Month, also known as Hispanic Heritage Month, which is a great excuse to highlight books by Latine authors to read for the 2025 Read Harder Challenge! Each checks off at least one task. Most of these books come recommended by Book Riot’s Latine resident literature expert, Vanessa Diaz. If you want more recommendations like this in your reading life—and believe me, you do—sign up for her excellent Latine Lit newsletter!
Task #1: Read a 2025 release by a BIPOC author.
 Archive of Unknown Universes by Ruben Reyes Jr.Ruben Reyes Jr. is the author of the short story collection There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, and this book is his debut novel. It’s a genre-bending tale of two families in alternate timelines of the Salvadoran civil war. In 1978 Havana and 2018 Cambridge, their stories explore displacement and loss, but also belonging and love. This is one of those books that asks big questions about what could have been. —Vanessa Diaz |
Task#5: Read a book about immigration or refugees.
 The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo VillavicencioVillavicencio wrote this nonfiction National Book Award finalist when she was on DACA. Writing a book about being undocumented under your own name takes deep, deep courage—Villavicencio did that to take us with her on a journey to learn the stories of other undocumented folks trying to find their place in this country. This is a memoir and essay collection that shares intimate stories that expose what the headlines and politicization of entire communities miss. Villavicencio doesn’t report on the lives of the people she meets from a distance—she goes all in to get to know them and walk in their shoes, if just for a moment, and does not hold back in sharing her own story. —S. Zainab Williams |
Bengali (Bangladesh) · 
English (United States) ·
What book do you recommend for Latine Heritage Month? Let’s chat in the comments!
Check out all the previous 2025 Read Harder posts here.