Books by country North America
Three books that put you in Panama. One, The Great Divide, is by a writer from Panama and set there. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Panama's writers have been little translated into English, so most readers meet the country through books about the canal that cuts across it. Spanish is the official language, and Panama has been independent from Colombia since 1903. Much of what is written in English about it gathers around the canal, which opened in 1914, and the Canal Zone, the American-run strip beside it where Panamanians, West Indian workers and Americans lived and worked.
Cristina Henríquez's The Great Divide is a novel of the canal's construction in the 1900s, moving between Panamanian, West Indian and American characters. Julie Greene's The Canal Builders draws on oral and archival sources for the labourers' history. Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General recounts his friendship with Omar Torrijos in the 1970s, while John le Carré's The Tailor of Panama is a spy novel set in Panama City after the invasion.
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A novel of the Panama Canal's construction, following Panamanian, West Indian and American lives in the Canal Zone, amid disease, labour and upheaval of the 1900s.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Panama.
Greene's memoir of his friendship with Omar Torrijos, showing 1970s Panama, the Canal Zone dispute and Torrijos's political style.
Spy novel set in post-invasion-era Panama City, capturing the expatriate scene, the canal handover and the country's political anxieties.
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