Ashes of the Amazon

by Milton Hatoum

Translated from the original Portuguese by John Gledson

Mundo is a rebel – the embittered offshoot of a rich family, whose artistic vocation clashes with his father’s dynastic plans. Ashes of the Amazon charts his determined flight from the fraught centre of his family’s wealth – the Vila Amazonia plantation – through Rio de Janeiro, and then to the effervescent worlds of 1970s Berlin and London.
In Ashes of the Amazon, Hatoum takes to heart Flaubert’s injunction to write ‘the moral history of his generation’, with extraordinary results. This is a beautiful, mature and involving novel from one of the most important South American writers of his time.

(From Publisher).

Milton Hatoum was born in Manaus, Amazonas, and studied architecture in São Paulo and comparative literature in Paris. He is Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Amazonas and a visiting Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California. He lives in São Paulo.