Edgell, Zee. Beka Lamb. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1982. The first internationally recognized Belizean novel, this story of a girl named Beka who is growing up with her country is required reading for all Belizean high schoolers and offers an excellent view of Belizean family life, history, and politics.

Lukowiak, Ken. Marijuana Time. Orion, 2000. Follow the author’s experiences on a six-month “hardship posting” to Belize in 1983 with the British military: “The long days are palliated by a constant and increasingly compulsive supply of drugs and japes, until he starts using his position in the army post-room to send improbably large bundles of the stuff home—to his army flat in Aldershot.”

Miller, Carlos Ledson. Belize: A Novel. Xlibris.com: 1999. This history-laden piece of fiction offers an impressively thorough snapshot of Belize over the last 40 years.

Westlake, Donald. High Adventure. Tor Books, 1986. Another marijuana-smuggling action thriller: “You are in the jungles of Belize. You pick your way carefully along the overgrown trail until you come to the clearing. There, above you, rest the ruins of a Mayan pyramid. Is that a stone whistle at your feet? An idol of the bat-god? Riches surround you and Kirby Galway will be more to happy to smuggle your finds to the United States in a bale of marijuana. Aren’t you glad you met Kirby?”