THE complex history of Peru and a relentless search by a writer to discover his family secrets merge compellingly in You Shall Leave Your Land (Chatto Press, £11.99), Renato Cisneros’ prequel to his award-winning book The Distance Between Us.

The book, skilfully translated by Fionn Petch, begins with a trip to a Lima cemetery where some of the author’s 19th century ancestors are buried. It is a journey to a convoluted past torn apart by wars, political struggles and revolution.

“…in a country like Peru — a country for centuries divided by caste, hierarchy and clan, riven by social discrimination … surnames can be letters of safe passage or guarantees, or indeed curses and sentences that determine the fate and destiny of individuals in advance.”

The narrator’s search for his family's past and his “real” surname becomes the main force that propels the book forward.

One ancestor became a poet and diplomat and in time, one of the leading representatives of the Peruvian Romantic movement.

Another became director of La Prensa newspaper and his travels as a journalist and diplomat in in Argentina and Uruguay are among the most compelling episodes.

You Shall Leave Your Land is about entrenched class privilege and the social and economic divides in Peru, as well as the changing fortunes of a family and a surname marked by illustriousness, adventure and deceit.

Jukub: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest (Girasol Press, £5) is an anthology of poems from Chiapas that advocates for linguistic resistance and solidarity with indigenous groups in Latin America.

Jukub means canoe in Ch’ol: “…a revindication of the paradoxical strength-in-weakness practices by the Zapatistas when they say, ‘Against the powerful trains, our canoes’.”

These poems were first composed in Ch’ol and Tsotsil, two of the almost 70 languages spoken in Mexico, and collectively rendered into English by five translators.

It comprises work from Edgar Darinel Garcia, Miriam Esperanza Hernandez Vazquez and Canario de la Cruz.

“We awoke/looked at one another in silence/like strangers/found that we were still here/saw our bare feet on the burning asphalt/and walked over our naked land,” writes Garcia as he explores what it means to belong to a marginalised group that now “move like ghosts through the cities.”

The short, haiku-like poems of de la Cruz uncover a world of mystical animals, plants and rivers. In “The brown feline,” animal and human merge into one: “I have the dark veil/that your eyes blind/and your heartbeat.”

A wonderful anthology of poets from Chiapas that deserves a broader readership.

Night (World Poetry Books, £17) was written by Ennio Moltedo (1931-2012) during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile but not published until democracy’s return.

Moltedo spent his life in the small Chilean coastal cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, where he wrote eight collections of poetry and co-translated with Pablo Neruda the anthology 44 poetas rumanos (44 Romanian Poets).

This collection is a little-known masterpiece that comprises various literary genres, from mini-drama and mini-epic to micro-fiction.

Its natural landscapes and weather patterns extend from the Atacama desert to the frozen expanse of Antarctica, interspersing with great poetic freedom the natural world of Chile with its political and revolutionary struggles.

His work is full of hope and political awareness. As the translator Marguerite Feitlowitz writes as a way of introduction, Moltedo’s poems “stop us in our tracks, but ultimately keep us moving—toward the light of labouring for a better future.”

A must-read poetry collection that confronts us head-on with the brutality of a regime that left over 3,000 dead or missing, tortured tens of thousands of prisoners and drove an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile.