These 12 short stories by some of Brazil's finest authors offer snapshots of Brazilian life, past and present, in all its teeming and vibrant complexity.

A magical retelling of the myth of Eldorado, the Enchanted City of the Amazon, by one of Brazil's most acclaimed writers

The setting for this magical fable is Eldorado, the enchanted city that inhabited the fevered dreams of European navigators and conquistadors, but eluded all attempts to find it on the map. Some have linked it to Manaus in the Amazon Basin, and it is here that Arminto Cordovil lives with his father Amando in a white mansion. Theirs is a relationship full of passion and limitless ambition. Separating father and son is a remarkable cast of characters, from Angelina, the dead mother, to Denisio, the infernal boatman, and at the center, Dinaura, a girl who bewitches Arminto and dreams of Eldorado. This rich and magical fable beautifully captures the atmosphere of the steamy, lush Amazonian world.

Introducing a major new voice in Brazilian letters.

Set among a Lebanese immigrant community in the Brazilian port of Manaus, The Brothers is the story of identical twins, Yaqub and Omar, whose mutual jealousy is offset only by their love for their mother. But it is Omar who is the object of Zana's Jocasta-like passion, while her husband, Halim, feels her slipping away from him, as their beautiful daughter, RGnia, makes a tragic claim on her brothers' affection.

Vivid, exotic, and lushly atmospheric, The Brothers is the story of a family's disintegration, of a changing city and the culture clash between the native-born inhabitants and a new immigrant group, and of the future the next generation will make from the ruins.

Set in the great Brazilian port of Manaus during the golden decades of the Rubber Boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is the story of identical twin brothers who battle for the love of their mother.  It is also a vivid and surprising portrait of a city built over the confluence of two great rivers in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, and the novel itself is full of eddies, dangerous undertows and shifting surface reflections.

While recounting the fortunes and trials of this Lebanese immigrant family over many decades, The Brothers also delivers a wealth of sensations to the reader: a city full of smells, of sounds and tastes as well as a dazzling array of sights.

Click here to read the first chapter.

‘Gripping ... a human story told in a world made real by a very good writer’ —A.S. Byatt, Guardian

‘From the start, this novel, a kaleidoscopic work following the lives of a Lebanese family living in the Brazilian port of Manaus in the middle of the 20th century, exerts a curious hold ... this is the sort of book in which people do not hold back. The lives of the family are one thing, but what also grips is Hatoum's evocation of this exotic world. From the markets, with their offal and flies, to the lush foliage, rich colours and myriad smells, this is an unusually sensual book’ —Daily Telegraph

'Brazilian novelist Hatoum creates an archetypal tale of brotherly hate that shakes a family. Twins grow up in a Lebanese family living in the Amazon port of Manaus: Yaqub the quiet engineer, pale as a chameleon on a damp wall; dissolute Omar, with 'the whiff of a jaguar's skin'. One of them is our narrator's father — the illegitimate son of the family's indefatigable maid, he spends the novel watching and wondering who spawned him, sobersides or spendthrift. Loping through the middle decades of the past century, the brothers' enmity becomes epic, Cain and Abel up the Amazon. Hatoum's singularity is to assemble a world of pungent detail — peppery stuffed fish, pulpy fruits — which is blown by melodramatic gusts of rancour. John Gledson's absorbing translation keeps its senses on full alert for a slumping hammock or the aniseed tang of arrack, for public brawling and sweaty sexual rivalry’ —Guardian