Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9781847924698
Format: Trade paperback (UK)
Year: 2025
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE UK


Description:
An adventurous, dazzling and original continent-sized history that brings South America's untold past and fascinating present to life




Stretching from the edge of Antarctica to the shores of the Caribbean, South America is a continent of stunning natural beauty and biodiversity, a cultural and culinary powerhouse that feeds, fuels and cools the planet. Yet this vast region remains an enigma to many outsiders, its 450 million inhabitants often forgotten, or stereotyped as eternal victims of colonialism, crime and corruption.



Patria reveals an alternative history of South America, spanning thousands of miles and five centuries to the present. Looking beyond modern borders, Laurence Blair takes as his waymarks nine countries that can't be found on a map- vanished realms, half-imagined utopias and dismembered homelands. He travels to each in turn - on foot and horseback, by rail and river - to trace their rise, fall and unexpected afterlives.




Blair goes in search of ancient Amazonian civilisations, a rebel Inca dynasty in the jungle, and the Patagonian power that defeated Imperial Spain. His journey ranges from a seafaring Peruvian kingdom made rich by bird droppings, to a fearsome nation of fugitives that defied slavery in Brazil, and an insurgent desert confederation that went down fighting with an Andalusian conman. He falls in with Bolivia's landlocked navy, the African freedom fighters who marched over the Andes to liberate the hemisphere, and the New World Napoleon who led Paraguay to its ruin.



Patria incorporates groundbreaking recent scholarship, striking archaeological disco