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Five books by writers from Costa Rica, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Assault on Paradise and A Beach House to Die For.
Little writing from Costa Rica has been translated into English. Most of its fiction and poetry is in Spanish, the Bribri and Cabécar peoples keep their own languages, and the Caribbean coast around Limón has long had English-speaking communities descended from West Indian workers.
Start with Tatiana Lobo's Assault on Paradise, a historical novel of colonial Cartago, where poverty, racial mixing and Church control shaped early Costa Rican society. Ricardo Fernández Guardia's Cuentos Ticos gathers wry tales of town and village life from around 1900. The Afro-Costa Rican novelist Quince Duncan portrays West Indian Limón and racism in San José in Weathered Men and The Four Mirrors, and wrote A Message from Rosa in English. For something lighter, K.C. Ames's A Beach House to Die For is a cozy mystery set on the Guanacaste coast.
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A historical novel of colonial Cartago, showing the poverty, racial mixing and Church control of early Costa Rican society.
A San Francisco woman inherits a beach house in a small Pacific-coast town in Costa Rica and is soon caught up in legal troubles, local wildlife and a murder.
The only novel that Costa Rica's leading Afro-Caribbean writer wrote in English, rooted like his Spanish work in the West Indian community of the Limón coast.
Ten wry tales of Costa Rican village and town life at the turn of the 20th century, from miraculous saints and buried treasure to local politics.
Two novels of Afro-Costa Rican life, the first following West Indian families on the Limón coast and the second a Black man's identity crisis in white-majority San José.
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