In 'The Fifth Mountain' Paulo Coelho takes us back to the 9th century, to the turbulent Middle East, where the prophet Elijah is struggling to keep his faith alive amidst a world of constant war, tyrannical royalty and pagan worship.

Evoking all the drama and intrigue of the colourful, chaotic world of the Old Testament, Paulo Coehlo turns the trials of Elijah into an intensly moving and inspiring story – one that powerfully brings out the universal themes of how faith and love can ultimately triumph over suffering.

“His books have had a life-enhancing effect on millions of people.”
THE TIMES

In this book, both beginning and experienced translators will find pragmatic techniques for dealing with problems of literary translation, whatever the original language. Certain challenges and certain themes recur in translation, whatever the language pair. This guide proposes to help the translator navigate through them. Written in a witty and easy to read style, the book's hands-on approach will make it accessible to translators of any background. A significant portion of this Practical Guide is devoted to the question of how to go about finding an outlet for one's translations.

There are no heroes in Igna cio de Loyola Branda o's world, only victims: not only of violence, but of deceit, desire, and fear. In The Good-Bye Angel, Branda o returns to his great subject: the tyranny of the community versus the individual, the city versus its inhabitants. Large enough to develop its own mythology, yet small enough to be provincial and petty, the city of Arealva (standing in for Brazil, and the world at large) is itself a character in Branda o's latest novel, toying with and finally consuming its citizens with the innocent cruelty of a cat with its prey--it's nothing personal, but it needs the meat. A cross between a film noir and a Greek tragedy, with more than its share of sex and drugs (though no rock 'n' roll), The Good-Bye Angel begins with a murder and ends in a panorama of ambition, obsession, libido, hypocrisy, and loneliness.

Jose de Alencar's prose-poem Iracema, first published in 1865, is a classic of Brazilian literature--perhaps the most widely-known piece of fiction within Brazil, and the most widely-read of Alencar;s many works. Set in the sixteenth century, it is an extremely romantic portrayal of a doomed live between a Portuguese soldier and an Indian maiden. Iracema reflects the gingerly way that mid-nineteenth century Brazil dealt with race mixture and multicultural experience. Precisely because of its nineteenth-century romanticism, Iracema strongly contributed to a Brazilian sense of nationhood--contemporary Brazilian writers and literary critics still cite it as a foundation for their own work.

Rubem Fonseca's Crimes of August offers the first serious literary treatment of the cataclysmic events of August 1954, arguably the most turbulent month in Brazilian history.
A rich novel, both culturally and historically, Crimes of August tells two stories simultaneously. The first is private, involving the well-delineated character of Alberto Mattos, a police officer. The other is public, focusing on events that begin with the attempted assassination of Carlos Lacerda, a demagogic journalist and political enemy of President Getulio Vargas, and culminate in Vargas's suicide on August 24,1954. Throughout this suspenseful novel, deceptively couched as a thriller, Fonseca interweaves fact and fiction in a complex, provocative plot. At the same time, he re-creates the atmosphere of the 1950s, when Rio de Janeiro was Brazil's capital and the nexus of political intrigue and corruption.
Mattos is assigned to solve the brutal murder of a wealthy entrepreneur in the aftermath of what appears to be a homosexual liaison. An educated and introspective man, and one of the few in his precinct not on the take from the "bankers" of the illegal lottery, Mattos suffers from alienation and a bleeding ulcer. His investigation puts him on a dangerous collision course with the conspiracy to depose Vargas, the novel's other narrative thread. The two overlap at several points, coming to their tragic end with the aged politician's suicide and Mattos's downfall.