Top 12 Books About New Mexico Updated 04 /2024

These 10 must-read books set in New Mexico cover a wide range of places in the state, from the city of Albuquerque to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, Northern New Mexico, and the sleepy hamlets, rural towns, and villages in the New Mexico mountains. They are all set in the state. There are a lot of books that take place in New Mexico.

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

He is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family. With herbs and magic, she is a curandera, a person who can help people get better. To find out what binds and divides him, Tony will look into his family history with the help of his wise mother. He will also discover who he is by looking into the magical secrets of the pagan past. Ultima, the woman who brought Tony into the world, is there at every turn of the road. and will help the birth of his soul.

Death Comes For The Archbishop by Willa Cather

"Willa Cather's best-known book is an epic, almost mythic, story about a single human life lived in the quiet of the southwestern desert." The Apostolic Vicar of New Mexico is Father Jean Marie Latour. He comes to serve in 1851. American law says that this land is ours, but it is also Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. He finds a huge area of red hills and winding canyons. He spreads his faith in the gentlest way he knows how for the next 40 years. He has to deal with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Cather creates a vivid picture of how life moves in a place where time seems to stand still.

Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford

The wealthy ship builder Frank Arnold, who lives in Mobile, Alabama, was given a volunteer Navy commission in the summer of 1944. He moved his wife, Ann, and son, Josh, 17, to the family's summer home in the New Mexico mountains. When Ann, who is a true daughter of the Confederacy, can't deal with the quality of life in the mostly Hispanic village, she turns to bridge and sherry with Jimbob Buel.

Josh, on the other hand, becomes a big part of the community in Sagrado. He makes friends with his new classmates, the town's disreputable artist, and the couple hired by his father to look after their house. Josh tells the story of how his year in Sagrado turned out to be the most important one of his life. With irresistible deadpan, irreverent humor, he describes the events and people that helped him grow up. Josh is free from his mother's disdain for these "tacky, dusty little Westerners." He comes into his own and learns about duty, responsibility, and love as a young man.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

It was in the late 1930s when Billy Parham, who was 16, caught a she-wolf that had been attacking his family's ranch. Then, instead of killing the animal, he decides to take it back to the hills of Mexico. His journey began with that crossing. It was a long, difficult, and at times dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as quickly as heat-lightning–a world where there is no order "except that which death has put there."

Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade

She writes with great intensity, dark humor, and emotional precision, and her stories are unforgettable. They put us inside the hearts of fierce, troubled people who want to escape the past or go down into its depths." Night at the Fiestas is a debut book about living in a land that has been shaped by love, loss, and violence. It is set in northern New Mexico.

So Far From God by Ana Castillo

In Tome, a small New Mexico town that's full of wonders and wonders, Sofia and her four daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and La Loca, have to deal with both hardship and love.

Fire on the Mountain by Edward Abbey

"Edward Abbey's classic 1962 book, Fire on the Mountain, is still beautiful, powerful, and relevant 50 years later." Douglas Brinkley, the New York Times best-selling author of The Wilderness Warrior and Walter Cronkite, has written a new introduction for this book. It tells the story of a tough old loner who takes on the combined, well-armed forces of the government who want to get rid of him from his land. "Rough American individualism is celebrated in this book," Brinkley says.

The Wives Of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit

At least they were ready for adventure, or at least ready for it to happen." Hope quickly turned to hardship as they had to adapt to a rough military town where everything was kept a secret, even what their husbands were doing at the lab. Though they didn't know each other, they worked together to adapt to a landscape that was both fierce and fascinating. It was full of the everyday things that people do and the drama of scientific research.

During this time, babies were born, friendships were formed, children grew up, and Los Alamos became a real community: one that was strained by the words they couldn't say out loud or in letters, and by the freedom they didn't have. This is how it happened: But when the war was over, there would be even more problems for the scientists and their families. They would have to deal with the fact that they had played a role in the most destructive force in the history of mankind.

"The Wives of Los Alamos is a tribute to a group of real-life women who played a big role in one of the most important research projects in modern history."

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

Thirty years after it was first published, Ceremony is still one of the most powerful and moving works of Native American literature, a book that is itself a ceremony of healing. During World War II, Tayo, who has mixed ancestry, goes back to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He has been scarred for life by his time as a prisoner of the Japanese and by the way his people treat him. With help from Indian history, only then can he start to find peace again. Ceremony is a book that will stay with you for a long time because it's well-written and full of Pueblo myth.

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols

Angry hustler Joe Mondragon slammed his truck to a stop, put on his boots, and marched into the dry, sandy ground. " He tapped into the main irrigation channel very carefully, but also illegally, because he didn't want to get caught. And so the Milagro beanfield war began, even though few people knew about it at the time. This war, like everything else in Milagro, was going to be a piecemeal one, with tactical retreats more important than victory in front of the enemy. The small farmers and sheepherders start to gather around Joe's bean field as a symbol of their lost rights and lost lands. Down in the capital, the Anglo water barons and power brokers are in a hurry to get rid of that symbol before it wrecks their multimillion-dollar land development projects.

"The story of Milagro's rise is both wild and tender, a vivid picture of a town that stumbles and is prodded on its way to its own salvation."

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