South America Fiction

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

Based on a remarkable true story. Winter, 1969. Since she was a little girl, Catarina learned not to ask for much. Born to a family of corn farmers in rural south Brazil, she was happiest when she was surrounded by sprawling fields and burly, familial farmhands—until her family was driven out of the land they had worked diligently for years, and Catarina was sent to work for a wealthy family in São Paolo. Only ten years old, Catarina becomes a housemaid—and the lifeline of her family. Far from everyone and everything she’d ever known, she discovers the shocking gap between her life ...

Chasing El Dorado: A Daring Quest in 16th-Century South America is a gripping historical exploration narrative set during the tumultuous era of European colonialism in South America. In this riveting tale, follow the exploits of Spanish adventurers driven by the promise of untold riches, leading them through perilous jungles, hostile territories, and intense cultural interactions. Discover the story of Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada, the determined explorer who, in his quest for the mythical city of gold, El Dorado, navigates through dense forests, combats sickness, and negotiates with native ...

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage.

If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this book for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, which relies more heavily than most works of this kind on first-person accounts, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

2025 Kindle Book Review Awards Semifinalist — Literary Fiction A Legacy Written in Blood and Pearls… Blood for Pearls: 1498 – The First American Genocide is a powerful, emotionally searing historical novel based on real events that forever changed the Americas. Set during the third voyage of Christopher Columbus, this epic tale explores the brutal birth of the pearl trade in the Caribbean and the catastrophic consequences for the Indigenous and African peoples of the New World.In 1498, Columbus arrives on the fabled Pearl Coast—what is now Venezuela—and discovers the tiny island ...

Five years after the Battle of Waterloo, Sharpe’s peaceful retirement in Normandy is shattered. An old friend, Don Blas Vivar, is missing in Chile, reported dead at rebel hands – a report his wife refuses to believe. She appeals to Sharpe to find out the truth. Sharpe, along with Patrick Harper, find themselves bound for Chile via St. Helena, where they have a fateful meeting with the fallen Emperor Napoleon. Convinced that they are on their way to collect a corpse, neither man can imagine that dangers that await them in Chile…

Stranded in a tropical rainstorm at Iquitos, Peru, burned-out art therapist Dianti Robertson waits for a boatman long overdue. She must complete the construction of a library for Yanamono Amerindians on the upper Amazon before the wild deluges of the rainy season halt all construction. English eco-activist Christian St. Cloud offers her passage on his trimaran. River pirates attack, and he believes her cargo is their target. Haunted by the memory of nine indigenous villages destroyed by a dam project in Venezuela, Christian opposes anything he sees as a threat to the ancient Amerindian way ...

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People". His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.

Captured at Culloden. Imprisoned in Inverness. Sold at Norfolk. Gabriel Chisholm longs for the freedom of the Scottish Highlands, before British hands reduced him to a white slave for the next seven years. But two obstacles stand between him and liberty. One is the most dangerous storm of the 17th century, a tempest that imperils the entire colony of Virginia. The other is a duo of greedy Englishmen, eager to destroy both him and his master. And in a world of aristocrats, simply defending himself could leave Gabriel hanging high on English gallows. Can this transplanted Scottish warrior ...

From Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Katherine Rundell comes an exciting new novel about a group of kids who must survive in the Amazon after their plane crashes. Fred, Con, Lila, and Max are on their way back to England from Manaus when the plane they're on crashes and the pilot dies upon landing. For days they survive alone, until Fred finds a map that leads them to a ruined city, and to a secret.

Having rescued Cassidy McKnight from kidnappers in South America, Gabe Sinclair thought his job was done. Not that the former Navy SEAL could ever forget the brave, beautiful single mother. But when the danger followed her home, Gabe promised to protect her. Why anyone would want to kill Cassidy was a mystery. Was the motive related to the orphaned toddler Cassidy was raising, a sweet little girl who brought out the father figure in maverick Gabe?

From the acclaimed Ojibwe author and professor Anton Treuer comes an essential book of questions and answers for Native and non-Native young listeners alike.

Corinne La Mer isn't afraid of anything. Not scorpions, not the boys who tease her, and certainly not jumbies. They're just tricksters parents make up to frighten their children. Then one night Corinne chases an agouti all the way into the forbidden forest. Those shining, yellow eyes that followed her to the edge of the trees, they couldn't belong to a jumbie. Or could they?

“Extraordinary . . . [Bolaño’s] greatest work.” —James Wood, The New York Times Book Review “A marvelous river of feeling, a brilliant meditation, an enthralling fantasy—By Night in Chile is the real thing, and the rarest: a contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in...

Caught between the British army and the Patriot cause, Gabriel Chisholm chooses to fight for liberty. But is his desire for freedom enough to win against the most powerful army in the world? Defiance against the English Crown could cost this transplanted Scot everything, including his own life. But step by dangerous step, Gabriel weaves an elaborate web of intrigue and espionage against the most hated officer in the British army. At least until the powerful English Colonel discovers Gabriel is not the Loyalist he pretends to be. Fearing his family will pay for his sedition, Gabriel flees ...

Skinny, nine-year-old orphaned Dores is working in the kitchen of a sugar plantation in 1930s Brazil when in walks a girl who changes everything. Graça, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy sugar baron, is clever, well-fed, pretty, and thrillingly ill-behaved. Born to wildly different worlds, Dores and Graça quickly bond over shared mischief and then, on a deeper level, over music. One has a voice like a songbird; the other feels melodies in her soul and composes lyrics to match. Music will become their shared passion, the source of their partnership and their rivalry....

Journeyman: A Brighter Sunshine of Their Own is the fourth novel in the award-winning Journeyman Chronicles of the American Revolution. In the fall of 1780, the American cause in the South is teetering on the edge of collapse. The Continental Army has been shattered at Camden, and the future of the Revolution hangs by a thread. Lieutenant Colonel Will Yelverton and his loyal companion Charles Cuthbert answer the call of duty. Their mission: to support the daring guerrilla campaign of the legendary Swamp Fox, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Marion. Will and Cuth ride with Marion’s rag-tag ...

From phenomenally successful fantasy author Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time), writing as Reagan O'Neal, comes The Fallon Blood, a splendid story of the American Revolution, now for the first time in audiobook format. In 1765, Michael Fallon, an Irishman on the run from brutal English overlords...

Convertido en emperador de Brasil a los veintitrés años, Pedro I marcó con su huella la historia de dos continentes. Desmedido y contradictorio, las mujeres fueron su salvación y su perdición: mientras su esposa, la virtuosa Leopoldina de Austria, lo llevó a la cumbre, su amante, la ardiente Domitila de Castro, lo arrastró a la decadencia. Cuando el inmenso Brasil se le hizo pequeño y el poder dejó de interesarle, puso su vida en juego por aquello que creía justo. Y alcanzó la gloria.