Sandino's Daughters by Margaret Randall (1981) — Oral histories of women who fought in the Nicaraguan revolution, collected just after the Sandinista victory. Many of the women interviewed came from the northern highlands around Matagalpa and Estelí. Direct, moving, and specific about the lives of people in this region during the revolutionary period.
The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli (2002) — A memoir by the Nicaraguan poet and novelist who was a Sandinista operative and later a government official. Belli writes beautifully about the revolution's idealism and its betrayals, and about growing up in a Nicaragua that no longer exists. Her perspective is that of someone who genuinely believed in the project and watched it disappoint.
The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie (1987) — Rushdie's account of a three-week visit to Nicaragua in 1986, when the Sandinista government was under pressure from the Contra war. A literary author trying to understand a revolution; sympathetic but not uncritical, and full of specific observations about how the country looked and felt in the mid-1980s.