Longlist
Beyond the Wall East Germany, 1949-1990
Katja Hoyer
A Death in Brazil
Peter Robb
Delving into Brazil’s baroque past, Peter Robb writes about its history of slavery and the richly multicultural but disturbed society that was left in its wake when the practice was abolished in the late nineteenth century.
Even today, Brazil is a nation of almost unimaginable distance between its wealthy and its poor, a place of extraordinary levels of crime and violence. It is also one of the most beautiful and seductive places on earth. Using the art, food and the books of its great nineteenth-century writer, Machado de Assis, Robb takes us on a journey into a world like Conrad’s Nostromo. A world so absurdly dramatic, like the current president Lula’s fight for power, that it could have come from one of the country’s immensely popular TV soap operas, a world where resolution is often only provided by death.
Like all the best travel writing, A Death in Brazil immerses you deep into the heart of a fascinating country.
- First published:
- 2003
- Published by:
- Henry Holt and Company
- Length:
- Hardcover 329 pages
About the author
Peter Robb was born in Toorak in 1946 and grew up in Australia and New Zealand. He has lived in Europe and South America for much of his adult life. In 1996 Midnight in Sicily was published in Australia and won the Victorian Premier's Award for non-fiction. In 1999 Peter Robb received the same award for M, his acclaimed biography of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Published by Bloomsbury in June 2004, A Death in Brazil is as unorthodox a travel book as M is an unusual biography, combining writing on politics, history, culture and food in an in-depth account of a fascinating country.
