In Vidas secas (“Barren Lives“), a classic in Brazilian literature, Graciliano Ramos describes the life of a peasant family from the northeast of Brazil moving from place to place in order to escape a drought, enduring hardships while still dreaming of a better life. Written in austere but captivating prose, the reader is immediately drawn into this cyclical story, envisaging the torrid landscape under a merciless sun and feeling with these outstanding characters whom life has treated so badly.

Angústia (“Anguish”) tells the story of Luis da Silva. Plagued by a sense of inferiority and obsessive destructive fantasies and after an agonizing inner journey, he commits a murder. After an emotional breakdown, Luis da Silva starts evoking different stages of his life, his unhappy childhood on his father’s deteriorated estate, episodes of near starvation, the depressing routine of an unknown journalist. Mingling the past with the present, which is hardly more positive, forever on the lookout for odd jobs, Luis’ mind grows more and more disturbed.

When he meets his neighbour, the beautiful Marina, Luis immediately falls in love with her. He starts dreaming of a better future that might bring some kind of sense into his life, but, impoverished as he is, he cannot offer Marina what she is looking for – money and luxury. Marina turns to the wealthy Julião, and Luis, already depressed, starts to give free reins to his ever-increasing jealousy and hatred. Envious of Julião’s money, his desire for revenge and destruction increases. When Marina falls pregnant, Luis is finally driven over the edge and kills Julião.

In this masterpiece, Graciliano Ramos once again enchants the reader with his precise and dry prose, which only emphasises the starkness of his characters and their surroundings. With great expressive force, he gives testimony to the socially and psychologically refined relationships of his protagonists and their inner developments, which are characteristic of all his novels.

It is 1873 in Santander, in the north of Spain. Magdalena and Juan are a married couple without many resources, whose desire to have children is not fulfilled. An miscarriage fractures their hopes and turns Magdalena into a sombre and uncomfortable figure. As the situation worsens, Juan decides to take his uncle at his word and they travel to the Jalisco Highlands in Mexico to change their future. This is the point of departure for a narrative that explores migration, revolutionary revolt, feminine subalternity and the resistance of the oppressed. From these threads, the perpetual wounds that will mark their descendants for generations to come, will take shape.
In the spirit of the new magical realism, with a sober and poetic language, surrounded by indigenous songs, prayers and incantations, In the Shade of a Dead Tree (“A la sombra de un árbol muerto”) tells of the life of those who face their destiny from the place they occupy long before they are born.

In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in Moscow to divide Poland between them. In The Polish Girl (“La niña polaca”), Mónica Rojas tells the story of Ania’s family, deported from their native village of Komarno, in eastern Poland, to a Siberian gulag. Suddenly everything they had known, all the rituals of life, a happy and intimate environment, are lost and replaced by hunger, forced labour and death. Ania turns 15 on the train that takes them to Siberia, where they spend almost two years felling and stripping trees in winter, working in temperatures as low as minus forty degrees, sleeping in barracks where no one knows if the person sleeping next to them will survive the night, and always exposed to the violence and malice of the guards.

It was in this hell that Ania meets again the image of Cezlaw, her first love, dissipated between reality and imagination. And where she meets the serene Olga, an old woman enslaved in the gulag, who spends her days telling stories and reciting poems. Thanks to these two people, Ania is able to endure life until the liberation of the Poles following the amnesty signed at the leather and mahogany desks of the world’s leaders.

And now? And afterwards?
After crossing deserts and oceans, Ania and her family find a new homeland: Mexico. What does Poland have to do with Mexico? For them, everything and nothing. More than eight decades later, Ania and the Polish survivors of the gulag give voice to those who did not survive, to those who lost their homeland forever. And they convey a vital and hopeful message: a new homeland, a new future, can be found by preserving the memory of that loss.

What do a poor boy, a rape, a boxing promoter, and an abandoned family have in common? In Mónica Rojas’ novel these are the elements that make up the dramatic story of Lobo. Lobo is the nickname of Lupe Quezada, the novel’s protagonist, in the boxing world. Lupe lives in Tijuana with his sister Diana and his alcoholic mother, who has not got over being abandoned by her husband. Diana is repeatedly raped at work by José Luis, her boss, and Lupe is not prepared to tolerate it. In a one-on-one fight, the strong, burly rapist dies under his furious blows. What Lupe doesn’t know is that José Luis is part of the city’s organised crime scene. Soon he feels persecuted. But Aníbal, the boss who would normally do a simple settling of scores, is also a boxing fanatic with an old dream. Fascinated by young Lupe’s prowess, he offers him a professional career under his patronage. The scrawny Lupe accepts without a second thought because he knows he owes him his life and sees in the proposal the possibility of having some prospects in the world for him and his sister. After years of training, Lupe’s rise is dazzling and Aníbal is proud. Their relationship resembles more and more that of father and son. Lupe is willing to do anything to please his benefactor, including dirty jobs. He is totally focused on his career. The young Celeste, initially paid by Aníbal to have sex with Lupe, soon becomes his mistress and even the mother of his child, but Lupe has no feelings for her. Everything gets complicated when Lobo and Aníbal’s fiancée Ana meet and Lobo has to decide between a few moments of happiness and love, versus his loyalty to Aníbal.
Mónica Rojas masterfully immerses us in a story of passionate confrontation, where the human condition of the protagonists, linked to the desire to be and to exist, leads us to live and suffer first-hand the feelings of each of the actors in this novel.

Set in Brazil’s high plateaus, Vastlands: The Crossing (“Grande Sertão: Veredas”, abbreviated as GSV and formerly known as “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands”) stands as a monumental literary achievement, encompassing a mythical landscape untouched by the law, where jagunços—bands of outlaws—wandered in the early 20th century. GSV weaves an epic tale of honor, vengeance, and love, tracing Riobaldo’s journey from youth to a retired rancher. His bond with Diadorim, forged in battles and shared moments on the oasis-like veredas, forms the heart of the narrative, alongside Riobaldo’s struggle with his growing romantic feelings.

Through Rosa’s masterful narrative, readers are immersed in a world where language dances and enchants, reflecting the diverse dialects of the Brazilian backlands. GSV is widely regarded to be the greatest work of Brazilian literature, and one of the greats of Lusophone and Latin American literature. A 2002 poll of 100 writers from around the globe saw it included on the Norwegian Bokklubben World Library list of the 100 best books of all time. It is only now, sixty years later, that a radical new translation is available due to the efforts of award-winning translator Alison Entrekin, who has spent the last seven years carefully recreating Rosa’s wordplay. An excerpt of her translation won the 2022 AAWP (Australasian Association of Writing Programs) Translators’ Prize.

Guimarães Rosa’s first collection of short stories, Sagarana, had an explosive effect upon the Brazilian literary scene. In this classic, the author evokes the unique universe of the Sertão in the style that was to become his trademark. Called the “James Joyce of the Portuguese language” because of innovations like the use of neologisms and an oral story-telling technique, Guimarães Rosa confounds places and landscapes, intermingling the real, the imaginary and the fantastical.

After the publication of Grande Sertão: Veredas, Guimarães Rosa returned to the genre of short fiction and published several collections of stories and novelettes, among others Corpo de baile (“Corps de Ballet”).

Guimarães Rosa received the most important literary awards of his country and has been translated into numerous languages.

In this book, Mauricio Rosencof opens a window—the only one possible when all that existed was a wall. For twelve years, that window was the imagined rectangle through which memory, words and hope entered. Through the magic of poetic prose, the window becomes both a symbol and a passage: from shadow to life, from confinement to the open air, from imposed silence to the voice that resists.
Rosencof unravels the secrets of a life that could not be broken. Every page embodies the determination to keep looking: outside lie the sky, the trees, the murmur of the street. Inside, the memory that refuses to fade.

The journey of From The Window (“Desde la ventana”) concludes with a farewell to his lifelong companion and comrade, José Pepe Mujica. There, the window opens once more to look upon his comrade, to discover that loyalty and ideals will never falter. It is a farewell that is both intimate and political, in which friendship is revealed as a form of resistance.

In My Brother Leonel (“Mi hermano Leonel”), the author engages in an imagined dialogue with his brother Leonel, who died in childhood, using prose and memory to shed light on the years of captivity during the Uruguayan dictatorship. The figure of the child—frozen in time—becomes a companion and a counterpoint in the darkness of the dungeon, whilst memories of his parents and the traces of the Holocaust in his family history also emerge. Through tenderness, humour and existential reflection, this book reveals a new side to the author.

My Brother Leonel is a work imbued with tenderness, compassion, humour and poetry, in which Rosencof offers a new, intimate and existential glimpse into his life. A moving book in which memory, pain and tenderness engage in a dialogue with loss and hope.

More than sixty years ago, at the table of a bar that no longer exists, some of Montevideo’s cultural and political personalities met to debate, in the midst of a society threatened by fear.
From the symbolic space of this bar table, and with the Olivetti typewriter commanding the actions, Rosencof conjures up memories and key figures from Uruguayan recent history. Memory guides the journey, and through the pages appear the approaching dictatorship, the revolutionary movements that seek to change history, the politicians of the time, the chronicles of captivity together with the tenderness of a father who wants to tell his daughter a story, and in this way to ward off the horror. And, above all, the freedom that finds every opening from which light can spring.
For the Little Ones to Come (“Por los chiquitos que vienen”) unties the knots of memory, searching the past to think about the future.

On the verge of turning 90, Mauricio Rosencof decides to rummage through the drawers of his memory to weave the tale of his own history, the one that led him to undertake a feat that marked his life and that of many others. With the Root on the Shoulder (“Con la raíz al hombro”) is a brave, sincere and emotional book; indispensable. This book represents a highly personal and engaged look at the process that gave rise to the revolutionary movement which erupted in Uruguay during the 1960s. Rosencof writes about events he lived through; his gaze does not aspire to universality or objective truths. From the origins of the MLN-Tupamaros through the milestones of revolutionary action, prison, and torture, to the return of democracy, these pages represent a personal, unique, and reflective point of view. Mauricio Rosencof was a witness and a protagonist, he helped to change the destiny of his country. He is a man who fought tirelessly for freedom and democracy.

An unexpected find in Mauricio Rosencof’s library was the creative impulse for his novel The Silences of the Old Man (“Los silencios del viejo”), whose roots go back to the origins of the story of a Jewish family who landed in Uruguay fleeing the Holocaust. A book whose process of writing revealed to the author himself surprising aspects of his own family’s history.
Don Isaac’s journey by train, to go and talk to Mauricio, his imprisoned son, symbolises another journey, deeper and more complex, which unites the destinies of different generations in their struggle against injustice and dislocation.

“The old photos contain little green. There are no trees in colour. Everything is grey, white, black. They are photos from before. I am from before. I’m part of the shoebox universe. And I try to fit in as best I can.”
To ignore the hood that imprisons him in a present of pain and injustice, the narrator escapes with his imagination to the shoebox where the photos are kept. This is the refuge where memories are a living present. The idealised childhood and youth in 1950’s Montevideo, the neighbourhood, first love, political persecution, family secrets, the aftermath of the Holocaust; all this comes together in a text that is suggestive, moving and full of poetry.

Mauricio Rosencof’s most personal book.

In The Private Life of Tota (“La vida privada de la Tota”), the neighborhood’s in turmoil. The police arrived to raid the house of la Tota, apparently looking for her nephew, Antonio. The neighbors are crowded into the sidewalk, waiting for what might happen as they exchange ideas, suppositions, myths, gossip. Nobody knows much. But there is a denunciation, two shots were heard. They are looking for a body. This is the starting point for revealing the story of Tota, amiable character who is part of the neighborhood stage, someone who fights bravely to overcome loneliness. Other creatures parade along with her, born of the imagination and memory of Mauricio Rosencof, who puts them on stage with compassionate gaze and deep understanding of the human essence. The nostalgia, the tenderness and the small joys of people so heroic as well as inconsequential are part of the charm of this book, which is inscribed within the Rosencofian saga of a neighborhood that contains in itself the metaphor of our society. The volume is completed with an essay by Professor Leticia Collazo on this fictional space and its characters, and illuminates from a different perspective the creation of one of the most relevant writers of the last decades in Uruguay.

Since Rosencof was freed in 1985 during a general amnesty he has been invited to numerous conferences and congresses at the most important universities in Europe and America. His dramatic works have been performed internationally. His prose texts The Bataraz (“El Bataraz”) and The Letters That Never Came (“Las cartas que no llegaron”) are yet to be discovered.

In Las cartas que no llegaron young Moishe talks about his oppressive childhood and youth, which were marked by war, loss, flight and indomitable courage. As an adult Moishe will report again later from La Paz. His letters are evidence of deep humanity that has survived death, letters full of music, macabre humour and sadness which never arrived. And those in El Bataraz were never written, for the first-person narrator had neither paper nor pen at his disposal to satisfy his urgent need to communicate during his years of solitary confinement. He does so with a cock, the bataraz. With fascination the reader enters into the narrator’s physical and mental world and asks himself, whether the bataraz actually existed: having shared the narrator’s fate of imprisonment and torture and having assumed the role of conversation partner, in the end, this cell companion mutates into his betrayer and executor.

In his novel The Fire Messenger (“El enviado del fuego”), Rosencof passes the word on to the inhabitants of a mental home in a long monologue, which argues for unconditional love, tenderness, human dignity and humour being the only weapons against discontentment in every day life.

The sonnets entitled The Daisy (“La Margarita”), which were written in prison and smuggled out in the seams of clothes, tell in simple words the story of a first love, of an imaginary Margarita, a girl from the neighbourhood. In 1994 the popular Uruguayan rock musician Jaime Roos put 15 of the 25 sonnets to music. The poems and CD have now been reissued in an attractive new edition, together with interviews with those involved.

Like the sonnets, Rosencof’s work A Gondola Anchored in the Corner (“Una góndola ancló en la esquina”) evokes the atmosphere of the southern quarter of Montevideo at the beginning of the 1960s. The wonderfully woven story tells of a confetti salesman who, on his search for love, makes a pact with the devil, and henceforth meanders through the area on a gondola until he finally finds happiness. The events – which include other small romantic dramas – are observed and commented on by four card players in the local café. It may not appear so at first, but they take on the very essentials of life.

In Half World (“Medio Mundo”) the author reflects on humanity and on the urgent need for man to take control of his destiny, a destiny that only depends on his strength and conviction, because God, this apparently omnipotent and eternal figure, created man as an intelligent and free being, even though the reality, both actual and historic, reveals that he left a lot of unfinished business, with many unpleasant events to follow.

In this novel the omnipotent God figure has lost his strength and in a last attempt to exercise his absolute control he cannot think of anything else to do but call a meeting, 2,000 years later, in a very non biblical setting, a suburb of Montevideo, with the protagonists of that biblical story: Jesus of Nazareth, Mary, Judas, Mary Magdalene and the fishermen. All these characters are called together for this particular meeting without knowing why or who it is that has brought them together. Only at the end, at the last supper, which on this occasion is a more human affair, with exquisite delicacies, do they realise that the God who called them together has no more cards to play. This punishing God who tried to correct a civilisation by drowning it in a flood and who refrained from acting during Hiroshima and Auschwitz, has nothing left to offer. Now everything is in our hands alone.

In this latest novel, Rosencof calls on the strength of humanity, on the strength of everything and every one of us to build a better future, one that is freer and less dark. In the rewriting of certain Biblical passages, man is given that unique opportunity, beyond Biblical maxims: to love each other.

Without sentimentality Limón Reggae draws up a kaleidoscopic portrait of an unusual young woman and a family torn by affairs and racism in Central America. Time leaps and flashbacks allow an unexpected view behind the scenes of the historical process of radical change on the subcontinent. From the fragmented movement of the black people and the fight of the cocoa planters for their land it leads right up to the peace talks of the 90s with the known outcome of immense social gaps, poverty and crime.

When young Aisha retrieves her black friend Ahmed after three years – formerly Parcival, he had gone underground – she becomes infected by his political ideas, though she is highly disappointed that he now has a girlfriend. As a witness to various scenes in which she comes across children of seemingly baseless aggression, she wishes to understand the cause for such extortionate hatred. After discovering how the big landowners of Costa Rica shatter all political intentions and prevent a land reform she initially withdraws from the resistance. Aisha finds romantic love through the bourgeois Luis and experiences her own version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, though he will not introduce her to his parents for her darker skin. When she joins a guerrilla group, she suffers hunger and persecution, but simultaneously feels part of a group with the utopia of a better society. Furthermore, Aisha is entrusted with little Toñito and loves him as if he were her own. When he goes missing after a courier operation, she almost turns insane with pain. Her wounds are only slowly healed by the discovery of Reggae and the love of Raymond, although she is once again rejected by the family of her lover. The relatives of Ahmed’s brother dismiss her for being light-skinned and they break up.

Years later, the peace plan has long come into force, Aisha is travelling as an interpreter, when children – members of the violent maras – seize a moment of negligence and kidnap her. Once again Aisha looks into eyes full of hatred, when a second later she recognises Toñito …

Tabajara Ruas has become well known for his novels which are set in southern Brazil. He has chosen historical themes as in Netto perde sua alma (“Netto loses his Soul”), as well as contemporary actions which are set against the backdrop of the military regime and the repression in his country, like A região submersa (“The submerged Region”) with first editions in Portugal and Denmark in 1978), a novel which could only be published in Brazil in 1981. An altogether exciting crime story told with linguistic precision and which has not lost anything of its topicality. The same goes for the novel O amor de Pedro por João (“Pedro’s Love for João”). In his gripping thriller O fascínio (“Fascination”), playing with fantastic elements from the classical ghost story, Tabajara Ruas shows how the past can catch up with the present, while depicting a man from better social circles who does not shrink from continuing the crimes of his predecessors.

In the crossover novel Perseguição e cerco a Juvêncio Gutierrez (“The Persecution and Encirclement of Juvêncio Gutierrez”), the 13-year-old first-person narrator is watching a soccer match while his uncle J.Gutierrez, who is being hunted by the police for smuggling, returns to his hometown. A clash with the police is inevitable. For the boy the uncle is an important figure of identification. The soccer match and the arrival of the uncle take place simultaneously and are masterfully linked in the narrative. The author perceptively describes the transition to adulthood, the awakening of sexuality and the growing awareness of political and social conflict.

When run-down private detective Cid Espigão tries to solve a client’s case, he gets drawn into an adventure that leads him from the underground of Porto Alegre to the Brazilian jungle and Acapulco. Fighting against alligators, beautiful women and a powerful tyrant, Cid barely manages to stay alive. Written in a self-ironic tone, O detetive sentimental (“The Sentimental Detective”) is a lively road movie in the guise of a crime story.

In Os varões assinalados (“The Bold Heroes”), Ruas writes about one of the most important historic events of southern Brazil, the Farroupilha Revolution. In prison, Bento Gonçalves meets the Italian freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi. They flee and build a new republic whose fate soon lies in a single battle… Packed with action and true to detail, this captivating novel shows us both sides of the civil war.