In times of uncertainty, books offer escape, refuge, comfort and knowledge. They can be transporting or teach us about ourselves. Their format is gentle and undemanding, even when their contents are not. This year and the last have been uncertainty personified. In a seemingly never-ending era of ambiguity, books are an anchor, something to hold onto. Here we present seven recent titles on disparate subjects connected to the Southwest. A word to the wise: experts indicate that book shortages are a possibility this holiday season due to ongoing COVID19-related supply chain issues. If there’s a title you’re set on, buy early — and locally if possible!

Bright Star

Yuyi Morales (Holiday House, 2021)

In Yuyi Morales’ latest children’s book, a whitetail fawn awakens and takes her first steps in the desert. Told with verdant, collage-like illustrations, the story follows the fawn as she encounters the delights of the natural world: other creatures ( javelinas, hummingbirds, long-tongued bats) and desert flora: velvet mesquite, blooming prickly pear, and towering saguaro cacti. The fawn meets danger too — she lives in the borderlands, and her migration, along with that of other wildlife, is impeded by a tall steel wall crowned in curlicued barbed wire. A Caldecott Medal honoree and the author and illustrator of many books, Morales suffuses Bright Star with interconnection: Spanish phrases mingle with English ones; on a visual level, pollinators abound, ensuring the continuation of life cycles. Bright Star offers potent, age-appropriate lessons about interdependence, division and belonging. At the end of the story, additional text from Morales about why and when she wrote the book provides context and depth for older readers.

Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer

Jamie Figueroa (Catapult, 2021)

Rufina and Rafa, a brother and sister in their late 20s, live in Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, a fictionalized version of Santa Fe. Unfolding over the course of a single weekend, Jamie Figueroa’s debut novel accompanies the siblings after their mother’s death. If they can make enough money busking on the Plaza for Rafa to buy a plane ticket out, he promises to step off the path of self-destruction. Figueroa, who is Boricua (Afro-Taino), was raised in Ohio and lives in Northern New Mexico. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she’s now an assistant professor. Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer is lyrical and poetic, even though the circumstances depicted are often bleak. Figueroa is an imaginative and daring writer, taking readers to the edges of consciousness and possibility — prepare for ghosts — while also diving into ongoing real-world inequalities like racism and settler-colonialism. At once an intimate examination of grief and a broader treatise on intergenerational trauma, the novel captures the zeitgeist and contradictions of the Southwest in the early 21st century.

Santa Fe Modern: Contemporary Design in the High Desert

Helen Thompson, photographs by Casey Dunn (Monacelli Press, 2021)

To adequately display all the coffee table books about historic architecture in Santa Fe, one would need a houseful of tables. There’s no lack of beautifully photographed books about Pueblo architecture, territorial revival style or the ingenious, functional design of plazas. But until this fall, there’s been a dearth of books on contemporary architecture in Santa Fe. Enter Santa Fe Modern: Contemporary Design in the High Desert. Featuring text by Helen Thompson and the spare, airy photography of Casey Dunn (Thompson is a Santa Fe resident, and she and Dunn have collaborated on two prior books about architecture and design in Marfa, Texas), this new addition to the tabletop scene proves that it’s not all adobe and vigas anymore: many designers use steel, glass, and concrete to highlight the landscape and frame broad vistas. There’s still plenty of adobe, a naturally sustainable insulator, often used in congress with other materials. With decisive lines and sharp angles, the homes in the book have a visual philosophy in common: they’re deliberate responses to place, designed to celebrate the specificity of the land.

Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land

N. Scott Momaday (Harper, 2020)

Kiowa poet, essayist, novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner, octogenarian and Santa Fe resident N. Scott Momaday published two books in 2020: a volume of poetry, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems, and Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land. Like Momaday himself, Earth Keeper is multilingual and cross-disciplinary. The nonfictional work incorporates humor, illustrations and storytelling. Throughout, Momaday makes the case that humans are of the earth, our fates inextricable. At once a lamentation of what’s already been lost, a celebration of what still is and a warning about how much we have to lose, Earth Keeper is deeply personal yet offers lessons for everyone. As Momaday said to NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro last year, during an interview about The Death of Sitting Bear, “I think the Native American who has an experience of 30,000 years in the North American landscape has developed a kind of conservative notion of the land. I think of that experience as enabling him to become what I call a multiple-use conservationist. He wants to save the land. He understands that the land is possessed of spirit, and it’s sacred.”

A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the Southwest

William deBuys (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Ten years old this year, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the Southwest, by local author William deBuys, paints a grim, poignant portrait of the future of our region and other arid places. Drawing on historical records, decades of water rights negotiations and emerging climate science, A Great Aridness demonstrates that as the planet warms, the Southwest is trending hotter and drier, toward desertification. Since the book’s publication, the climate crisis has intensified. Worldwide, 2020 was the hottest year on record, and in the United States, the last decade has seen more hurricanes of greater intensity in the North Atlantic and longer and more catastrophic wildfire seasons in the West. A silver lining: public discourse has an urgency now that it didn’t have when the book was first published. In 2011 Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was just 8 years old; the world hadn’t yet witnessed successful Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock; and the United States hadn’t withdrawn from the Paris Agreement under President Trump before recommitting under President Biden. According to deBuys, we’re going to need reserves of resilience going forward. In an email he told Feliz Navidad that the climate models used in the book are extremely accurate thus far. “Unfortunately, if they missed the mark at all, it is that the changes they forecast are happening faster than predicted,” deBuys writes. “Worse, the screws of drought are sure to keep tightening and the horrific fires of California and the Pacific Northwest will come to New Mexico before long. You can count on it . . . . Good people are trying to mitigate emissions and to implement adaptive measures at the state and local level all around the country, but their job should not be as hard as it is.”

The Five Wounds

Kristin Valdez Quade (Norton, 2021)

Like Kristin Valdez Quade’s 2015 short story collection Night at the Fiestas, her debut novel, The Five Wounds, is a story about Northern New Mexico, Valdez Quade’s homeland. (A former employee at Collected Works Bookstore, she now teaches at Princeton University in New Jersey.) The Five Wounds was initially published as a short story in The New Yorker before being expanded into a novel. The setting is the fictional town of Las Penas, which resembles Chimayó, both physically and in its deep-rooted Catholicism. As the book opens, 33-yearold Amadeo Padilla is preparing to play the role of Jesus in the town’s Good Friday pageant when his 15-year-old daughter, Angel, shows up on his front porch, eight months pregnant. The days that follow are by turns funny, tender and heartbreaking, suffused with Valdez Quade’s generous insights into the flawed, hopeful human spirit. The setting and characters are so fully realized that it’s easy to believe that Angel, Amadeo, and the rest of their family live a quick drive up NM 84/285. This is a mustread, for lovers of both the region and multigenerational family sagas.

Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border

Octavio Solis (City Lights Publishers, 2018)

In this 2018 memoir, first-time author and longtime playwright Octavio Solis writes about coming of age on la frontera, a borderland both physical and ephemeral. Each retablo — a small devotional painting of Jesus, Mary or a saint that depicts moments of divine intervention — is a vignette, a window into a moment of Solis’ life growing up in El Paso. From the earliest stories, when Solis’ parents migrate to the U.S. to marry, shortly before he’s born, and as his undocumented father faces the threat of deportation soon after, we are reminded that the crisis on the border is perpetual, persisting across presidential administrations. Solis is a U.S. citizen, but the tension at the border and constant threat of deportation shape his experiences into adulthood. In one story, a friend and a coworker are taken by la migra, the immigration police, when the restaurant where Solis works is raided. Somewhat unique in Solis’ approach as a memoirist is his upfront acknowledgement that memories themselves are a kind of fiction, shifting and liminal as we recall and reconstruct them. In Retablos, the emotional throughline runs deep and true.

Adele Oliveira is a writer raised in Santa Fe. A 2020 graduate of the MFA program at IAIA, she lives here with her family.