The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family’s roadside camp.With sudden shifts in the characters’ lives, this novel takes in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the worlds of São Paulo’s rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians along Brazil’s highways. One man escapes into an immigrant squatter’s life in London, while another’s performance activism leads to unexpected fame on Youtube.Written from the gut, it is a raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a home.

    It is the story of Tereza, the twelve-year-old girl who is sold into slavery by her aunt. It is the story of Tereza, the young woman, who is jailed for defending her lover only to find him untrue. And it is the story of Tereza, reigning goddess of love – inspiration to poets, painters, and sailors on leave; mistress of a noble patriarch; chief-of-staff to the armies of whores on strike; and triumphant Queen of the Samba – desired, admired, and honored by all.

    Flush with his newfound wealth, Rubiao heads for Rio de Janeiro and plunges headlong into a world where fantasy and reality become increasingly difficult to keep separate. Brilliantly translated by Gregory Rabassa, Quincas Borba is a masterful satire not only on life in Imperial Brazil but the human condition itself.

    Availing herself of a single character, Lispector transforms a banal situation—a woman at home, alone—into an amphitheater for philosophical investigations. The first-person narration jousts with language, playfully but forcefully examining the ambiguous nature of words, with results ranging from the profound to the pretentious: "Prehuman divine life is a life of singeing nowness" or "The world interdepended with me, and I am not understanding what I say, never! never again shall I understand what I say. For how will I be able to speak without the word lying for me?" These linguistic games frame existential and experiential crises that Lispector savors and overcomes. Although this idiosyncratic novel will not have wider appeal, those with academic or markedly erudite tastes should find much to savour.

    Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the center of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee's theory of the "Eternal Orangutan," which, given all the time in the world, would end up writing all the known books in the cosmos. Verissimo's small masterpiece is at once a literary tour de force and a brilliant mystery novel.

    Years later, he relives the episode as he examines the mistakes of his past and struggles for forgiveness. His father, who has Alzheimer’s, obsessively records every memory that comes to mind, and his grandfather, who survived Auschwitz, fills notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.This powerful novel centered on guilt and the complicated legacy of history asks provocative questions about what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century.

    The poor orphan Aurélia is devastated when her true love, Fernando, breaks their engagement for the financial rewards of a marriage of convenience to another. But Aurélia unexpectedly inherits a fortune and plans her revenge. Winning marriage to Fernando with a large dowery, she stuns her lover on their wedding night by imposing a marriage of convenience until the dowery is returned. The marriage descends into one of hate more than convenience, until both recognize the errors of their ways.

    Cicade de Deus, the City of God, is one of Rio's most notorious slums. Yet it is also a place where samba rocks till dawn, where the women are the most beautiful on earth, and where one young man wants to escape his background and become a photographer. City of God is a sprawling, magnificently told epic about gang life in Rio's favelas, based on years of research and Pualo Lins's firsthand experience growing up in Cicade de Deus. A book that gives voice to the dispossessed of multiethnic Brazil, City of God will earn Paulo Lins more well-deserved international acclaim.

    The poor and innocent have nothing to fear from him; often they profit from his spontaneous generosity. The rich and powerful, and the detective who tries to spoil his fun, however, must beware. They are the target of Arsene’s mischief and tomfoolery. A masterful thief, his plans frequently evolve into elaborate capers, a precursor to such cinematic creations as Ocean’s Eleven and The Sting. Sparkling with amusing banter, these stories—the best of the Lupin series—are outrageous, melodramatic, and literate.13 stories: The Arrest of Arsène Lupin Arsène Lupin in Prison The Escape of Arsène Lupin The Mysterious Railway Passenger The Queen's Necklace Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late Flashes of Sunlight The Wedding-ring The Red Silk Scarf Edith Swan-neck On the Top of the Tower Thérèse and Germaine At the Sign of Mercury

    But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour - it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions around the village.Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiyanagi household are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music. Death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. Soon, amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is on the scene to investigate what will become a legendary murder case, but can this scruffy sleuth solve a seemingly impossible crime?

    Teresa Mendoza is his girlfriend, a typical narco's morra-- quiet, doting, submissive. But then Guero's caught playing both sides, and in Sinaloa, that means death. Teresa finds herself alone, terrified, friendless and running to save her life, carrying nothing but a gym bag containing a pistol and a notebook that she has been forbidden to read. Forced to leave Mexico, she flees to the Spanish city of Melilla, where she meets Santiago Fisterra, a Galician involved in trafficking hashish across the Strait of Gibraltar. When Santiago's partner is captured, it is Teresa who steps in to take his place. Now Teresa has plunged into the dark and ugly world that once claimed Guero's life-- and she's about to get in deeper...

    Against the vivid, gritty backdrop of 1980s China, Lu Yao traces the proud and passionate Gao Jialin’s difficult path to professional, romantic, and personal fulfillment—or at least hard-won acceptance.With the emotional acuity and narrative mastery that secured his reputation as one of China’s great novelists, Lu Yao paints a vivid, emotional, and unsparing portrait of contemporary Chinese life, seen through the eyes of a working-class man who refuses to be broken.

    On the primitive frontier of desert and mountain in the backwoods of Brazil, fifty-two hundred houses and every man, woman, and child who lived in them had been destroyed. The ten-month-long house-to-house battle, the agony of guerrilla warfare, the bitterness of "scorched earth" retreat was ended. The federal army of Brazil had defeated the religious mystic, the fanatic street preacher, the Messiah to thousands, who had led from December, 1986, to October, 1897, the strangest of all rebellions.Yet Antonio Conselheiro's personal war did not go unsung. Os Sertões—called Brazil's greatest epic—is Euclides da Cunha's searing, moving account of Conselheiro's struggle. It is a valiant cry of protest against oppression of the weak by the strong and a wise and compassionate record of a shocking totalitarian crime perpetrated against a handful of backwoodsmen in a little-known corner of the world.In this brilliant English translation by Samuel Putnam, Rebellion in the Backlands retains its force as a classic contribution to man's understanding of the human spirit and the human struggle.

    As Luiz Ruffato describes the scenes around him on this one typical day, he deciphers every minute and second of a metropolis marked by diversity—a mosaic of people from all over Brazil and the world that defines São Paulo’s personality at the start of the twenty-first century. The city is more than just traffic jams, parks, and global financial maneuvering. It is alive, and every rat and dusty grocery truck informs its distinctive character.Winner of the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Award and the APCA Award for best novel.

    It is here he dreams of traveling to distant lands; and here, as a young man, he begins an affair with the store's married clerk. Forced to flee when his lover's husband discovers the affair and denounces Max to the Nazi secret police, Max steals away to Hamburg, where he takes passage on a freighter destined for disaster. When the ship founders somewhere off the coast of South America, Max is trapped in a dinghy with a hungry jaguar. Max believes his days are numbered-until he washes ashore on the coast of tiny Porto Alegre, Brazil, prepared to begin anew in the tropical clime. But when Max discovers his next-door neighbor is a Nazi hiding from persecution, he finds that for the first time in his life, he is the master of his own destiny, ready to take matters into his own hands...