Books by country South America
Two books by writers from Suriname, set there, that give a real sense of the place: The Cost of Sugar and We Slaves of Suriname.
Few books by writers from Suriname are available in English, so readers often meet the country through history and testimony. Dutch is the official language, but Sranan Tongo is spoken across the country, alongside Hindustani, Javanese and Maroon languages. The Maroons, descended from enslaved Africans who escaped the plantations, have passed their histories down by word of mouth.
Cynthia McLeod's The Cost of Sugar, translated from Dutch, is a historical novel of eighteenth-century plantation society around Paramaribo. Anton de Kom's We Slaves of Suriname, a 1934 anticolonial classic, joins history with personal testimony. Richard Price, an American anthropologist, gathered Saramaka accounts of their ancestors' escape and wars in First-Time, and portrays a Saramaka healer in Travels with Tooy.
“Find a copy” goes to Bookshop.org. If you buy, we earn a small commission and independent bookshops get a share too.
Historical novel of an 18th-century Paramaribo plantation family, showing slavery, the planter elite and Maroon resistance in colonial Suriname.
Part history, part personal testimony, it covers Surinamese slavery, colonial rule and the struggle for dignity, by a Paramaribo-born anticolonial writer.
Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Guyana Paraguay Peru Uruguay Venezuela