Sal used to know his place with his adoptive gay father, their loving Mexican American family, and his best friend, Samantha. But it's senior year, and suddenly Sal is throwing punches, questioning everything, and realising he no longer knows himself. If Sal's not who he thought he was, who is he? This humour-infused, warmly humane look at universal questions of belonging is a triumph.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780544586505 20170321

A gay Latino's intimate journey through addiction, human desire and broken love.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9781941026656 20171017

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

• He has gone to be with the women
• The art of translation
• The rule maker
• Brother in another language
• Sometimes the rain
• Chasing the dragon
• The hurting game.

Sometimes the border is a mirror, sometimes an escape, and sometimes it's just the bridge you cross to go home.

Eighteen-year-old Zach does not remember how he came to be in a treatment center for alcoholics, but through therapy and caring friends, his amnesia fades and he learns to face his past while working toward a better future.

Two teenaged boys with very different lives find that they share a common bond--fathers they have never met who left when they were small boys--and in spite of their differences, they become close when they each need someone who understands.

• The way she looked at me
• Pifas and Gigi and the politics of Hollywood
• Another name for exile
• The citizens of Hollywood rise up against the system
• Welcome to Hollywood.

It is 1969, America is at war, "Hollywood" is a dirt-poor Chicano barrio in small-town America, and Sammy and Juliana face a world of racism, war in Vietnam, and barrio violence. Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood is a Young Adult Library Services Association Top 10 Best Book for Young Adults and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Young Adults. Benjamin Alire Saenz--novelist, poet, and writer of children's books--was named one of the "Fifty Most Inspiring Authors in the World" by Poets & Writers magazine. He was also a finalist for PEN/USA's literary award for children's and young adult literature. Saenz lives in El Paso, Texas.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9781933693996 20160619

When Little Diego gets a Superman outfit for his birthday, he hopes to fly across the border to Mexico to be with his grandfather whom he loves.

From the author of the highly acclaimed literary novel "Carry Me Like Water" comes a stunning, dramatic psychological thriller that delivers on every level and reaffirms Luis Arrea's claim that Benjamin Senz is "writer with greatness in him." In "The House of Forgetting, " seven-year-old Gloria Santos is taken by Thomas Blacker from the barrio of El Paso, Texas, to Chicago. There, in the home of the respected writer and academic, Gloria is raised to be refined, educated young woman with an appreciation of literature, music, and fine cooking. For more than twenty years she is confined to Blacker's house and only occasionally allowed in the garden he so meticulously keeps. She becomes, it seems, like his flowers--lovingly tended, but utterly at his mercy. As she reaches adulthood, Gloria grows more and more aware that her situation is in unacceptable, and she finds herself confronting her future and the man who has shaped her past. She struggles to distinguish between love and obsession, between gratitude and obligation, and, ultimately, between betrayal and self-preservation. Naive, frightened, and caught between a world she hates and one she does not know, Gloria must summon all her courage and moral strength or risk losing the life she longs for. In the lyrical prose for which he is known, Benjamin Senz offers a haunting psychological drama that examines one woman's search for her identity and explores what it means to have freedom. "The House of Forgetting" is a riveting tale of abduction, lost innocence, and revenge--a page-turner in the truest sense, a novel that longers in memory, and one that establishes Benjamin Senz as one of the most versatile, insightfulwriters working today.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780060187385 20160527

As an abandoned deaf mute son of Mexican migrant workers struggles as a dishwasher in El Paso, drawing solace only from his makeshift circle of friends, his sister lives an assimilated Yuppie life in San Francisco, taking great pains to keep the past buried forever. Saenz's epic tale brings to light amazing revelations about the wonders of love, family, friends, and compassion.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780786861354 20160527