RAMIFICATIONS (Charco Press, £9.99) is Mexican writer and poet Daniel Saldan Paris’s second novel and it’s a courageous and moving story told from the perspective of a child living in the Educacion neighbourhood of Mexico City as he tries to make sense to the sudden disappearance of his mother Teresa.

She abandoned the family home to join the Zapatista uprising that began in 1994, leaving behind her two children, a husband and a whole life in the city.

Through startling family anecdotes, childhood memories and the experiences of everyday life, Paris has managed to create a brave book that sheds light on the inner life of a working-class family in a country blighted by years of violence and machismo.

The imaginative protagonist, a child obsessed with origami, looks at the crumbling world surrounding him with fresh, sometimes naive eyes. The origami becomes the perfect metaphor for the folding and unfolding of a shocking secret that is revealed at the end of the book.

Like his endless origami attempts, the vivid childhood experiences of the protagonist will ultimately shape a life forever marked by a sudden family loss, an absent father figure and his own issues with masculinity.

It’s a captivating novel by one of the most important figures in contemporary Mexican literature.

Chilean writer Andrea Jeftanovic’s Theatre of War (Charco Press, £9.99) also deals with the experiences of a child growing up in a home in turmoil and in her novel it’s the home of a family originally from the Balkans who emigrated to Chile to escape the ravages of war.

A story of historical and personal losses, family exile, trauma and belonging, it’s told from the perspective of young protagonist, Tamara. The ghosts of war, the constant threat of hunger and violence reappear in her new Latin American homeland. It affects the way she relates to her father and it’s tearing her family apart.

Jeftanovic’s staccato rhythms, with short lines and stark and sometimes dark imagery, matches the urgency of the novel, along with its lyrical and symbolic qualities. The maturity and confidence of a writer drawing on her experience as a short-story writer, essayist and journalist is impressive in what's an assured debut novel.

Latinx poet and activist Matt Sedillo’s new poetry collection Mowing Leaves of Grass (Flowersong Press, £12) reads as a poetry manifesto denouncing the dehumanising actions of the ruling class, as well as the social and economic injustices created by a violent neocapitalist system.

It’s an urgent and instructive collection, exemplified by the poem Pedagogy of the Oppressor, where Sedillo writes: “And when they read/They read in conquest/And when they thought/They thought of process/And when they wrote/Again and again/It was the word progress/And when they spoke/A festival of bayonets/Impaled the audience/Line the children/It’s getting late November/Teach them Indian/Speak of gratitude/Speak of friendship.”

Unashamedly political, this is a book of poems written by a sharp Latinx writer exposing the pervasive forces of capitalism, racism and colonialism.

The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, £13), a bilingual poetry collection by Latinx writer Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, is both refined and fierce in its complex use of language in what are wide-ranging observations of modern life and the grief of capitalism.

Maldonado has managed to create a book of poems that uncovers the ambiguities and nuances of bilingualism, the intricacies of the personal, communal and political, as well as the challenges of communication and same-sex love, in a modern world.

Particularly striking is Love Poem, in which Maldonado writes: “Our somber city of meds & the grief/we happen to be around/—and want. What I think is I would not understand/whom he has loved because I would want ours./Problems were we were adolescent/in homosexual love, the usual history/of loss, profit./I’d like to think I am trying to keep up,/anyhow, with my rage.”

A confident debut, full of wit, tenderness and despair.