Best books…chosen by Cristina Henríquez

Novelist and short-story writer Cristina Henríquez is the author of The Book of Unknown Americans and The World in Half. Her new novel, The Great Divide, follows several characters whose lives intersect during the construction of the Panama Canal.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003). Despite having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004, this staggeringly beautiful novel—about Black slaveowners in a fictionalized town in Virginia during the antebellum era—is still woefully under-read. It’s a work of utter genius and profound humanity. I’m going to keep talking about this book forever.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967). My father bought this book for me when I ran out of reading material on a family road trip. García Márquez tackles Colombia’s Thousand Days’ War of 1899–1902, but in the most oblique way possible—and in some of the most captivating and exuberant prose possible.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017). Taking on the legacy of Japan’s occupation of Korea and the impact of World War II through the lens of multiple characters over multiple generations, Lee’s National Book Award finalist delivers a story that’s both immersive and sweeping. This is classic storytelling at its best.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969). The first time I read this book, in my younger years, I got to the last page and immediately turned back to the beginning and started reading again. A semi-autobiographical account of the firebombing of Dresden, this novel breaks so many rules that it made me rethink what is possible in fiction.

The Galleons by Rick Barot (2020). With a glance into the past that refracts back to the present, this collection of poems, many of which trace the Age of Discovery journeys of Spanish ships from Asia to the Philippines, beautifully merges history with the personal. Here poetry is “an illumination / of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.”

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987). The world is a better place for the work—and existence—of Toni Morrison. For me, no work compares to her Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, in which the devastation of slavery is paired with the intimacy and impossibility of motherhood. I was never the same after reading this book.