So many of the books published by Latino authors this year seemed to be working in response to our burning dumpster fire of a political climate. Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends and Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied dealt directly with the child migrant crisis and the violence and injustice of borders through non-fiction and poetry, respectively. Carmen Maria Machado, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Mariana Enriquez all used horror story tropes to deal with the real-life horror of violence against women; Samanta Schweblin and Juan Villoro do the same with environmental issues. We also were lucky enough to get straight-up radical joy and sorrow from poets like Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Marcela Huerta and memoirist Miryam Gurba.

These books are all worth a read, whether to transport you to a totally different world, like the California gold rush in In the Distance or a Brooklyn suffused with old magic in Shadowhouse Fall, or to engage with the world and see it all the more clearly, no matter how difficult the looking may be.

Without further ado, here’s a list of 15 unmissable books from 2017.