South American stories

A Chapter of Hats

by Joachim Maria Machado de Assis

Bloomsbury

The stories in this collection are beautiful vignettes of nineteenth-century Brazilian life. They sparkle with wit and a maudlin charm leavened by sly humour, but they also swipe at some less appealing aspects of Brazilian society - slavery and prostitution...

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The Past

by Alan Pauls

Vintage

The Past, by Argentine novelist Alan Pauls, is about obsessive love and self-destruction, and is a strange, unsettling read.

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The Armies

by Evelio Rosero

MacLehose

'Every time I begin to write it is out of desperation’ The Armies, Evelio Rosero’s portrait of the effect of civil war on one rural Colombian village, has a gentle opening that belies the horror to come.

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The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Bloomsbury

Like WG Sebald's Austerlitz, The Informers peels back layers of time to expose the secrets of the past. Although set in South America, far from the birthplace of Nazism, it reminds us that National Socialism's insidious tentacles stretched far across...

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