Books by country South America
Six books that put you in Brazil. Five are by writers from Brazil and set there, starting with Barren Lives and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The other is a wider pick, by someone who knows the place well.
Brazil's most celebrated novelist, Machado de Assis, wrote The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, narrated by a dead man in imperial Rio. Machado, who helped found the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1897, turned his irony on the slaveholding elite of the Empire. Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas, and its fiction often moves between the cities and the sertão, the dry backlands of the interior, where chapbook poetry known as cordel is still sold at markets.
Graciliano Ramos's Barren Lives shows a family of cattle herders struggling through drought in the north-eastern sertão. João Guimarães Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands is told by Riobaldo, a former jagunço, or backlands gunman. Paulo Lins's City of God charts the rise of drug gangs in a Rio housing project between the 1960s and 1980s.
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A poor family of cattle herders struggles through drought in the Northeast sertão, showing hunger, exploitation and silence in rural Brazil.
A dead Rio gentleman narrates his life with biting irony, exposing the slaveholding elite and social codes of nineteenth-century imperial Brazil.
Bentinho's jealous account of his marriage portrays Rio's middle-class households, church influence and social manners under the Second Empire.
Riobaldo recounts his life as a jagunço bandit in the vast sertão of Minas Gerais and Bahia, a landmark of Brazilian regional epic.
Based on years of research, it follows the rise of drug gangs in Rio's Cidade de Deus housing project from the 1960s to 1980s.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Brazil.
A friendship between a sugar plantation servant girl and a planter's daughter unfolds through Pernambuco's cane country and Rio's samba and radio world, 1930s onward.
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