From the author of The Tribes of Palos Verdes, a compelling new novel about a couple's getaway to a Mexican paradise that goes horribly wrong. Joy Nicholson's second novel, The Road to Esmeralda, is a dark, seductive story about Americans abroad. Fed up with their L.A. lives, Nick and Sarah decide to head south to Mexico. They are looking for something: love, self-fulfillment, inspiration, or even just peace of mind. However, as the roads get windier and the jungle thicker, this naïve pair realizes that all of the trappings of society-greed, drugs, violence and jealousy-exist even in the remotest of places. Even tiny Esmeralda has a secret agenda . . . While her prose remains hearfelt and spare, Nicholson, in The Road to Esmeralda, also reveals a political edge. In exploring the prejudices of a small Mexican town, she weaves a harrowing and tragic story of love, devastation, and what it means to be a young, intelligent American in a very angry world.

Seeking an escape from their lives in Los Angeles, lovers Nick and Sarah embark on what they hope will be a romantic adventure in the Mexican jungle but instead encounter a dangerous world of drugs, violence, and secret agendas.

As a young girl growing up in Spain, Ana Larragoity Cubillas is powerfully drawn to Puerto Rico by the diaries of an ancestor who traveled there with Ponce de Leon. And in handsome twin brothers Ramon and Inocente—both in love with Ana—she finds a way to get there. Marrying Ramon at the age of eighteen, she travels across the ocean to Hacienda los Gemelos, a remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited. But soon the Civil War erupts in the United States, and Ana finds her livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda’s slaves, whose richly drawn stories unfold alongside her own in this epic novel of love, discovery and adventure.

The friendship of a brother and sister in California, united by their love of surfing, but divided by their parents' crumbling marriage. Medina sides with the father, a doctor, Jim with the ex-model mother.

During the Spanish Inquisition, two kids fall deeply in love and then are caught up in it. She is burned at the stake, and he is boiled in acid, but death isnt the end, merely a short stop of two hundred years. They then find themselves in Los Angeles, California, and they are facing the same enemy. This time, they might have a chance.

A marvelous new anthology from the editors of Las Christmas in which our most admired Latino authors share memories of their mothers. The women lovingly portrayed in Las Mamis represent a cross section of Latino life and culture. They come from rich families in the big cities of Latin America, from rural immigrant families, and from the worlds in between-and they share an extraordinary inner strength, often maintained against incredible odds. Pressed by conflicting cultural expectations, circumstance, and religion, they have managed the challenges of motherhood, leaving enduring legacies for their children. Now, in these vivid, poignant, and sometimes hilarious reminiscences-all of them infused with distinct sabor latino-Las Mamis celebrates the universality of family love and the special bond between mothers and children. Contributors include: Esmeralda Santiago, Piri Thomas, Marjorie Agosin, Junot Diaz, Alba Ambert, Liz Balmaseda, Mandalit del Barco, Gioconda Belli, Maria Escandon, Dagoberto Gilb, Francisco Goldman, Jaime Manrique, Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Ilan Stavans

Magic, sexual tension, high comedy, and intense drama move through an enchanted yet harsh autobiography, in the story of a young girl who leaves rural Puerto Rico for New York's tenements and a chance for success.