Fiction > South American Fiction

Bluma Lennon, a Cambridge academic who had just acquired a copy of a book, is knocked down and killed at a crossroad. Intrigued by his death, his colleague begins an investigation which will take him on a journey from Cambridge to Buenos Aires and across the River Plate to Montevideo as he hunts for clues to the identity of an obscure bibliophile.

Like its noteworthy ancestors (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick) Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richar... read more

When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, "A Life in Exile", it never occurs to him that his father, a distinguished professor of rhetoric, will write a devastating review in a leading newspaper. The subject seems inoffensive enough: the life of a German Jewish woman (a close family friend) who arrived in Colombia shortly before the Second World War. So why does his father attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret?As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father's anger... read more

This is an extraordinary retelling of the passionate and tragic love between the conquistador Cortez and the Indian woman Malinalli, his interpreter during his conquest of the Aztecs. Malinalli's Indian tribe has been conquered by the warrior Aztecs. When her father is killed in battle, she is raised by her wisewoman grandmother who imparts to her the knowledge that their founding forefather god, Quetzalcoatl, had abandoned them after being made drunk by a trickster god and committing incest with his sister. But he was determined t... read more

Set backstage at the Cannes Film Festival, The Winner Stands Alone stages film directors, producers, stylists, models, consecrated actors and candidates for stardom to narrate the story of a serial killer who, obsessed with the woman that abandoned him, spreads panic in the world of the celebrities gathered in the French city.

This is the story of Brida, a young Irish girl, and her quest for knowledge. She has long been interested in various aspects of magic but is searching for something more. Her search leads her to people of great wisdom, who begin to teach her about the world. First published 2008.

Who is Athena? The orphan abandoned by her gypsy mother in Transylvania. The clerk working in a bank in London. The priestess of Portobello Road. This story chronicles Athena's life, as told by the many people who knew her well or hardly at all. Among them, her adoptive mother, a priestess, a calligraphy teacher, and an actress.

It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought.<br><br>It ends in obsession<br><br>One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage?<br><br>His search for her - and for the truth of his... read more

Enter the extraordinary world of Paulo Coelho, much loved author of The Alchemist. His new novel, The Zahir, tells a very different, gripping story of love, loss and passionate obsession.The protagonist of this new novel is a renowned author who writes about spirituality and once went on pilgrimage along the road to Santiago. On a return visit he is suddenly abandoned by his wife, who leaves no trace of herself. As the story unfolds, the author becomes obsessed with understanding the reason for her desertion.The title comes from a ... read more

Eleven Minutes tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heart-broken.At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that 'Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer...' A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune yet ends up working the streets as a prostitute.In Geneva, Maria drifts further and further away from love while at the same time developing a fascinat... read more

A young woman decides to end her meaningless life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Instead, she awakens in a coma in a mental hospital and experiences what she believes is a heart attack. She is told that she has five days to live.

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Llama in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as - whether it's Madame Robert Arnoux, the wif... read more

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Written in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing even his previous work in imagination, beauty, and scope. At the centre of the book is the fictional city of Santa Teresa on the Mexico-US border. It is an urban sprawl that draws in lost souls like a vortex: convicts and academics, an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' writer. But there is a darker side still.As in the real town ... read more

Nineteen-year-old Nayeli works at a taco shop in her Mexican village and dreams about her father, who journeyed to the US when she was young. Recently, it has dawned on her that he isn't the only man who has left town. In fact, there are almost no men in the village - they've all gone north. While watching The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli decides to go north herself and recruit seven men - her own 'Siete Magnificos' - to repopulate her hometown and protect it from the bandidos who plan on taking it over. Filled with unforgettable char... read more

From the moment Melquiades the Gypsy walks into the jungle settlement of Macondo nothing is ever the same again. He brings to this protected Eden knowledge and the tools of discovery. This is a modern parable told without moralizing, its strength lying in its ability to make us laugh in sympathy.

Herzog is alone now that Medeleine has left him. Locked for days in the custody of his rambling memories, Herzog scrawls frantic letters which he never mails. His mind buzzes with conundrums and polemics, writing in a spectacular intellectual labyrinth. Is he crazy, or is he a genius?

Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where Jose Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Ursula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands. First published in Spanish 1967; this translation 1970.

In his younger days, Simon Bolivar swept the Spanish back to Europe, liberating South America with his youthful vitality. But lonely, embittered and sickly at the age of forty-six, his power has dwindled, coups abound and it's time for The Liberator to send himself into the exile of retirement. Wending his way down the Magdalena River towards the Caribbean with his faithful servant, Jose Palacios, Bolivar's journey is hindered by his own reluctance to let his power go. Despite the assassination attempts, jeering and humiliation he ... read more

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the magical story of the Buend?a family, who love, lie, fight and rule for a century in Macondo, their settlement in the South American jungle. Part exotic paradise, part nightmare, Macondo is a fantastic world of miracles and mirages where nothing is as it seems. Its secrets lie hidden for years in an encoded book, and only Aureliano Buend?a, the last in the dynasty, can unlock its mysteries and discover the fate of this strange land ...