Whether you’re returning to old favorites or reading them for the first time, get these new paperback releases of three Julia Alvarez classics, as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of her seminal novel, In the Time of the Butterflies. Winner of the 2013 National Medal of Arts, Julia is well-known for her extraordinary storytelling, and with these standout novels, there’s no question as to why.

In the Time of the Butterflies

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.”

In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.

With a new postscript by the author.

How the García Girls Lost their Accents

Julia’s brilliant and buoyant and beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters recounting their adventures growing up in two cultures. Selected as a Notable Book by both the New York Times and the American Library Association, it won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for books with a multicultural perspective and was chosen by New York librarians as one of twenty-one classics for the twenty-first century.

In this debut novel, the García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow a tyrannical dictator is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wild and wondrous and not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways, but the girls try find new lives: by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents sets the sisters free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America.

¡Yo!

Obsessed by human stories, Latina novelist Yolanda García has managed to put herself at the center of many lives. Thrice married, she’s also managed to remain childless while giving very public birth to her highly autobiographical writing. She’s famous for it. Now her characters want a chance to tell their side of it. And tell it they do! Everybody who’s ever been caught in Yolanda’s web from her sisters to her third husband can hardly wait to talk. The stories they tell on celebrated writer Yolanda García (known to her intimates as Yo) deliver delicious insight into the very nature of artistic creation and the material from which it is built.

¡Yo! is a novel about what happens when an author really does write what she knows. At once funny and poignant, intellectual and gossipy, lighthearted and layered in meaning, ¡Yo! is, above all, the portrait of an artist. And with its bright colors, passion, and penchant for controversy, it’s a portrait that could come only from the palette of Julia Alvarez.