When it comes to writing about border towns like El Paso, Tex., where 22 people were killed in a mass shooting on Saturday, “there always seems to be something that’s a little bit off about how it’s depicted,” the novelist Oscar Cásares said. “It’s either demonized or it’s romanticized.”

And while outsiders “talk about it being the end of the country,” he said, “when you live there, you think about it as the beginning. This is where it starts. We are the people who are receiving immigrants.”

Cásares has spent considerable time reading, writing and thinking about such places. His novel, “Where We Come From,” which was published in June, is set in Brownsville, a Texas border town similar to El Paso. Here are four books he recommends for a stronger understanding of the people who live in these dual-culture places and what their lives are like.

‘Retablos’ by Octavio Solis

“It’s just a gorgeous little book,” said Cásares about this memoir in vignettes by a playwright who grew up in El Paso. “Ultimately I think books that work best about the border, without trying too hard, have that fluidity between the cultures.”