If Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown and Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose produced offspring, Alejandro Heredia’s LOCA would be their firstborn.

LOCA
by Alejandro Heredia
Simon & Schuster, February 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

LOCA follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.

“In this remarkable debut, Alejandro Heredia traces young lives from the streets of Santo Domingo to the streets of the Bronx, capturing the heartbreak of queer youth, a woman’s rebellion against the confines of motherhood, and, above all, the pain and power of friendship that extends across seas, and borders, and the struggle of working people to survive in America. It is the most generously written novel I have read in a very long time, and that generosity is a beautiful thing.” – Adam Haslett, Pulitzer Prize and National Award Book Award finalist for Imagine Me Gone and You Are Not A Stranger Here

Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. LOCA is his debut novel.