Short, niche fiction set in BERLIN
Ten Great Books set in SOUTH AMERICA
20th November 2024
Ten great books set in South America. South America, a continent of extremes, offers a captivating blend of natural wonders and cultural diversity. From the towering Andes to the vast Amazon rainforest, the continent is home to some of the world’s most breathtaking cities and landscapes.
Here are ten of our favourite books set in this amazing continent.
Into the Jungle by Erica Ferencik – BOLIVIA
Lily Bushwold thought she’d found the antidote to endless foster care and group homes: a teaching job in 32Cochabamba, Bolivia. As soon as she could steal enough cash for the plane, she was on it.
When the gig falls through and Lily stays in Bolivia, she finds bonding with other broke, rudderless girls at the local hostel isn’t the life she wants either. Tired of hustling and already world-weary, crazy love finds her in the form she least expected: Omar, a savvy, handsome local man who’d abandoned his life as a hunter in Ayachero—a remote jungle village—to try his hand at city life.
When Omar learns that a jaguar has killed his four-year-old nephew in Ayachero, he gives Lily a choice: Stay alone in the unforgiving city, or travel to the last in a string of ever-more-isolated river towns in the jungles of Bolivia. Thirty-foot anaconda? Puppy-sized spiders? Vengeful shamans with unspeakable powers? Love-struck Lily is oblivious. She follows Omar to this ruthless new world of lawless poachers, bullheaded missionaries, and desperate indigenous tribes driven to the brink of extinction. To survive, Lily must navigate the jungle–its wonders as well as its terrors—using only her wits and resilience.
The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez – COLOMBIA
It takes the form of personal and formal investigations into two political assassinations – the murders of Rafael Uribe Uribe in 1914, the man who inspired García Márquez’s General Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and of the charismatic Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the man who might have been Colombia’s J.F.K., gunned down on the brink of success in the presidential elections of 1948. Separated by more than 30 years, the two murders at first appear unconnected, but as the novel progresses Vásquez reveals how between them they contain the seeds of the violence that has bedevilled Colombia ever since. The Shape of the Ruins is Vásquez’s most ambitious, challenging and rewarding novel to date.
Banco by Henri Charrière – VENEZUELA
‘Banco’ continues the adventures of Henri Charriere – nicknamed Papillon – in Venezuela, where he has finally won his freedom after thirteen years of escape and imprisonment. Despite his resolve to become an honest man, Charriere is soon involved in hair-raising exploits with goldminers, gamblers, bank-robbers and revolutionaries – robbing and being robbed, his lust for life as strong as ever.
City of Brick and Shadow by Tim Wirkus – BRAZIL
Already struggling to keep their tiny congregation afloat, two Mormon missionaries stationed in the dangerous Latin American neighborhood of Vila Barbosa suspect the worst when Marco Aurelio, a man they recently baptized, disappears from a crowded street market. When the neighborhood’s corrupt police force shows no interest, Elder Toronto and Elder Schwartz decide to investigate Marco Aurelio’s disappearance themselves.
Breaking mission rule after mission rule, the elders doggedly pursue any clues that might lead them to their friend. As they interview the people who knew him–his short-tempered, bodybuilding brother; his gun-toting ex-wife; his mercurial former business partner–a tangled portrait emerges of an enigmatic con artist in over his head. At the edges of the investigation lurks a shadowy, mythical figure known only as the Argentine, a man who poses an increasingly dire threat to the two young missionaries as they plunge recklessly forward.
Crocodile Tears by Mercedes Rosende – MONTEVIDEO
The setting: Montevideo’s Old Town, with its dark alleys, crumbling facades and watchful residents. The gig: an armoured truck robbery. The cast: Diego, a failed kidnapper with weak nerves, Ursula Lopez, an amateur criminal with an insatiable appetite, the Hobo, a notorious hoodlum with excessive self-confidence. Dr. Antinucci, a shady lawyer with big plans. And finally, Leonilda Lima, a washed out police inspector with a glimmer of faith in justice.
Feast Days by Ian MacKenzie – SAO PAOLO
Intelligent and deeply felt, Feast Days follows a young wife who relocates with her financier husband to Sao Paulo–a South American megacity that impresses and unsettles, conceals and erupts. Here in her new home, she reckons with the twenty-first century as she encounters crime, protests, refugees gentrification, and the collision of art and commerce, while confronting the crisis slowly building inside her own marriage.
In stylish prose and with piercing wit, Ian MacKenzie tells the story of Emma, a young woman who has moved from New York to Brazil just as massive demonstrations against the government are breaking out across the country amid growing economic inequality. Emma has come to Brazil for her husband’s career, with no job prospects of her own, a weak grasp of the language, and a deep ambivalence about having a child. Her early days in Sao Paulo are listless but privileged; she dines at high-end restaurants, tutors wealthy Brazilians in English, and observes the city she now calls home.
But when Emma volunteers at a local church to assist refugees and grows more deeply connected to the people she meets in the course of her days, she finds herself unable to resist the tug of Sao Paulo’s political and social unrest.
As the country moves seemingly closer to a breaking point, so does Emma’s marriage, as she and her husband can no longer ignore the silent, tectonic shifts beneath the surface of their relationship.
Feast Days is a sharply observed story of expatriate life, as well as a meditation on the hidden costs of modern living and how easily our belief systems can collapse around us.
Red Road Green: A tale of the Amazon by Jonathan Franklin – AMAZON RAINFOREST
AMAZON, BRAZIL 1965. The government offers land and money to those brave enough to travel 2000 kilometres to make a new life in the jungle.
A brave young woman, Idenea, and her family are given a 50 hectare plot and begin clearing 40 metre high trees. Malaria is rampant; Indians watch; life is hard. When her baby is stolen, she is forced to flee in search of her child.
Nearby, is an unlikely ally. Bobby, an ex British soldier, has turned to ranching to hide from the demons of his past. Meeting in the Perfect Peace Motel they fall in love. He tries to protect her from slavery and his troubled history.
Full of reckless youth, they build a life together. But when political violence strikes can their love survive?
The Secret in their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri – BUENOS AIRES
The novel that became the Oscar-winning film.
Benjamín Chaparro is a retired detective still obsessed by the brutal, decades-old rape and murder of a young married woman in her own bedroom. While attempting to write a book about the case, he revisits the details of the investigation. As he reaches into the past, Chaparro also recalls the beginning of his long, unrequited love for Irene Hornos, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Set in the Buenos Aires of the 1970s, Sacheri’s tale reveals the underpinnings of Argentina’s Dirty War and takes on the question of justice—what it really means and in whose hands it belongs.
The Lonely Hearts Travel Club (Destination Chile) by Katy Colins – CHILE
Welcome to Paradise.
Georgia has just been offered the opportunity of a lifetime! She’ll be starring in a TV adventure travel show that will put her and Ben’s business well and truly on the map.
But Georgia’s not quite sure their relationship is ready to be put under the microscope – because even though they survived their first argument the discovery of a sparkling engagement ring in Ben’s suitcase has put Georgia’s head in a spin! Are they really ready for marriage? And more importantly, after all the heartbreak, is she?
This journey is sure to be an adventure like no other. Against the backdrop of rugged and wild Chile, Ben and Georgia must decide if their love is worth fight for…
Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo – LIMA
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011
Red April evokes Holy Week during a cruel, bloody, and terrifying time in Peru’s history, shocking for its corrosive mix of assassination, bribery, intrigue, torture, and enforced disappearance – a war between grim, ideologically driven terrorism and morally bankrupt government counterinsurgence.
Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned, literature-loving, quietly eccentric Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. Until now he has lived a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has ever happened to him. But, inexplicably, he has been put in charge of a bizarre and horrible murder investigation. As it unfolds by propulsive twists and turns – full of paradoxes and surprises – Saldivar is compelled to confront what happens to a man and society when death becomes the only certainty.
Remarkable for its self-assured and nimble clarity of style, Red April is at once riveting and profound.
Enjoy our selection of great books set in South America!
Tony for the TripFiction Team
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