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1.The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

Vargas Llosa's most vivid tale of myth, lore and shifting cultural identities moves from the grey streets of Lima to the depths of the Amazon rainforest. The narrator, a figure bearing close resemblance to the author himself, discovers a photograph of a tribal storyteller in a gallery in Florence. He is convinced he recognises this strange figure as his old friend Saul, whose port-stain birthmark earned him the nickname Maskface. As the narrator imagines Saul's transformation from Lima student to integrated member of the Machiguenga tribe, we are pulled deep into a journey from the modern world to our very origins.

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2. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

Argentina's modernist masterpiece, Cortazar invites us to read the novel's 155 chapters in whatever sequence we please. This fragmentory approach finds a common theme in Horacio Oliveira, a young Argentinian living in Paris and Buenos Aires. Cortazar excels in dialogue and meanders through the thoughts and conversations of his characters with delicious curiosity.

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3. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

This collection of short stories and essays offers a glimpse in to one of literature's most playful and imaginative minds. Returning again and again to the idea of the Library, a vast repository for all that is known and yet to be discovered, Borges writes of things at once surprising and strangely familiar. Readers follow him through these stories, a literary pied piper, leading us over the bounds of truth into his own strange land of unreality.

4. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

The great translator Gregory Rabassa once told of how he had been 'flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.' Clarice Lispector is much underrated in the English Language, but is surely due a revival. This memorable novella is narrated by a writer named Rodrigo, who recounts the short tale of Macabéa. Macabéa is one of life's unfortunates. She is neither pretty, nor lucky, and is barely scraping a living as a typist in Rio de Janeiro, but to Rodrigo's amazement, contempt and envy she never quite recognises just how cruel life has been to her. A neat, strange little book that lingers in a way that few stories manage.

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5. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

Death is in the air in this strange little novel, a casting off of earthly chains, the end of uncertainty and mortal fear; now eternity can commence. A young man travels to Comala, his hometown, to attend to his mother on her deathbed and search for his absent father. He arrives to find a ghost town, populated by a cast of drifting souls who piece together Comala’s story. Rulfo is held up as Mexico’s foremost writer, indeed, one of the most important of all Latin America. Remarkably his reputation rests on Pedro Paramo and a collection of short stories, the only fiction he ever published.

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6. Aura by Carlos Fuentes

Felipe Montero is a young historian who accepts a live in position editing the memoirs of an elderly widow’s late husband, General Llorente. The stifling atmosphere of the house is alleviated somewhat by the widow’s beautiful niece Aura, who seduces Filipe and then torments him with her unfathomable silences and baffling iciness’. As Filipe delves further in to the General’s memoirs, he learns more about the strange life of his widow and her desperate desire for a child, despite her husband’s infertility. This obsession did not die with age, and Filipe comes to the terrible realization that all in the house is not as it seems.

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7. Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

In an unnamed South American city trying to right itself after years of civil war, a radio announcer reads the names of the missing each night on Lost City Radio. Norma’s celebrated voice lists each lost loved one; the hundreds of boys who left their jungle villages to join the bands of impressive soldiers passing through; the fathers who travelled away to the city to find work and never returned; the unfortunates taken to ‘the Moon’ to be interned and punished for revolutionary activities. In a war with no clear frontline, enemy or reason, suspicion and paranoia make strangers of everyone and everyone knows someone who’s disappeared. Daniel Alarcon is a Peruvian living and working in America whose beautifully nuanced prose tempers a more urgent political enquiry in to the nature of war and its effects on ordinary society.

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8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. So opens Marquez’s most celebrated novel in an outstanding body of work. Spanning generations of the Buendia family in the fictional town of Macondo, this wistful, whimsical adventure in magical realism is essential reading.

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9. 2666

Published after his death in 2003, 2666 is sealed the reputation of Chilean writer Roberto Bolano as one of the greatest writers of his generation. This vast and sprawling novel is told in five parts, and assembles a vivid cast of characters and sets them loose in Santa Teresa, a gritty backwater town in the US-Mexico border. Hailed as a masterpiece by the critics, 2666 is one of the ambitions, original and extraordinary novels of recent times.

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10. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Allende's first novel is written firmly in the tradition of South American family sagas. It follows three generations of the Trueba family as the navigate the social and political upheavals of twentieth century chile. Believed by many to be a roman a clef, The Poet is idetified with Pablo Neruda, and The President with her cousin Salvador Allende.