I, Rigoberta Menchú by Rigoberta Menchú (1983) is the memoir of a K'iche' Maya woman from the Guatemalan highlands — her childhood, her community's culture, and the violence of the civil war that destroyed her family. Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The book remains the most direct account of the indigenous Maya experience during Guatemala's worst decades, and it reframes everything you see in the lake villages.
The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman (2007) is an investigation into the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi, murdered two days after publishing a report documenting army atrocities during the civil war. Goldman reconstructs the killing and its cover-up with novelistic detail. It is the best English-language account of how impunity worked in post-war Guatemala.
Silence on the Mountain by Daniel Wilkinson (2002) traces the history of a single coffee finca in the highlands, using the stories of the workers, landowners, and military officers connected to it to tell the whole arc of Guatemala's twentieth century — from the 1954 CIA-backed coup through the land reform it reversed to the civil war it enabled. It reads like a thriller and explains how this country became what it is.
The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman (1992) is a novel set between Boston and Guatemala City, following a young Guatemalan-American trying to understand the murder of his childhood friend, a woman who ran an orphanage in the capital. The portrait of Guatemala City, its class structure, and the atmosphere of fear in the late 1980s is vivid and accurate. Goldman lived the world he describes.