Bel Canto
2001 · 318 pages
Guerrillas storm a vice president's mansion somewhere in South America and hold the room for months. Among the hostages is a soprano who sings each morning, and everyone begins falling in love.
★ 5.5
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
In Patagonia
1977 · 204 pages
Chatwin traveled Patagonia chasing a scrap of giant sloth skin from his grandmother's cabinet, and collected Welsh settlers, anarchists and Butch Cassidy. He remade travel writing into something as strange as fiction.
★ 5.6
Open Veins of Latin America
1971 · 317 pages
Galeano's charge is that Latin America is poor because it was rich: five centuries of silver, sugar, rubber and oil carried off to Europe and the United States. Four dictatorships banned the book.
★ 5.7
The House of the Spirits
1982 · 433 pages
Clara predicts the future and moves furniture without touching it, while three generations of her family reach from the era of the great estates to the 1973 coup that comes for them.
★ 5.7
The War of the End of the World
1981 · 568 pages
In the Brazilian backlands a wandering preacher gathers thousands of the destitute, and the young republic sends four armies to wipe them out. Vargas Llosa grants every fanatic in it his own reasoning.
★ 5.8
The Conquest of the Incas
1970 · 672 pages
Fewer than two hundred Spaniards seized the Inca emperor at Cajamarca in 1532, and Hemming traces the forty years of rebellion and reprisal that followed, giving Andean witnesses equal weight with Spanish ones.
★ 5.9
The Tunnel
1948 · 138 pages
Writing from a prison cell, the painter Juan Pablo Castel explains why he killed the woman who understood his work. Sabato follows a jealous mind step by step until its logic feels ordinary.
★ 6.0
Tristes Tropiques
1955 · 424 pages
Levi-Strauss opens by declaring he hates traveling and explorers, then takes you into Brazil's interior among the Bororo and Nambikwara. Science, memoir, and philosophy run together in mourning for what contact destroyed.
★ 6.6
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
1881 · 368 pages
Bras Cubas writes from beyond the grave, dedicating his memoirs to the first worm that gnawed his corpse. A rich Brazilian idler tallies a wasted life with wit, malice, and zero remorse.
★ 6.6
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
1981 · 120 pages
Two brothers spend a morning announcing they will kill Santiago Nasar over their sister's wedding night, and nobody stops them. García Márquez reconstructs it from the witnesses who let it happen.
★ 6.8
The Hour of the Star
1977 · 81 pages
Macabéa is a half-starved typist from Brazil's Northeast, and the writer narrating her keeps stopping to ask what right he has to her poverty. Lispector makes that discomfort the whole book.
★ 6.8
The Voyage of the Beagle
1839 · 432 pages
Five years at sea gave Darwin fossil giants in Patagonia, an earthquake lifting the Chilean coast, and Galapagos tortoises. He wrote it as travel narrative, and evolution grew out of these notes.
★ 6.9
Nostromo
1904 · 496 pages
In a South American republic of Conrad's invention, silver from a mine props up a dictator, breaks a marriage, and corrupts the man called incorruptible. Conrad's anatomy of capital has not aged.
★ 7.2
Love in the Time of Cholera
1985 · 348 pages
Turned down as a young man, Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years for the woman he loves to be widowed. García Márquez makes old age more erotic than youth.
★ 8.4
One Hundred Years of Solitude
1967 · 417 pages
Seven generations of one family in Macondo, where insomnia comes as a plague and the rain lasts four years. García Márquez reports the impossible as plain fact.
★ 9.5