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Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

South America

• Venezuela
• Colombia
• Guyana
• Ecuador & Galapagos
• Peru
• Bolivia
• Paraguay
• Uruguay
• Chile
• Argentina
• Brazil
• St Helena

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  Chile: A Traveller's Literary Companion

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  A collection of twenty-two stories set in Chile, from authors and poets including Pablo Neruda and Ariel Dorfman.

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  Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  A superb collection of Kafkaesque short stories; surreal and extraordinary, they tell of a woman who vomits rabbits, a man who becomes trapped inside a fish's body and a man who becomes obsessed with a photograph of a woman seducing a boy.

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  The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A story of personal and political betrayal in Columbia in the years following the Second World War, this is one of the most original new novels to come out of Latin America in recent years; a powerful story told with subtlety and elegance.

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  The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Mario Vargas Llosa's satirical first novel tells the story of a group of cadets, bored and horrified by the violence of their military education, who plan to escape their barracks in Lima. A thrilling and powerful book, so controversial that a thousand copies were publicly burnt on the streets of Lima. Highly recommended.

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  Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Price: £16.99    Add to Basket

  The dark, brilliant new novel by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana. No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets. Antonio's fascination with the life of the ex-pilot becomes a troubled investigation that leads him all the way back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped a whole generation of Colombians in a living nightmare of fear and random death. The Sound of Things Falling, winner of this year's English PEN Writers in Translation Programme Award, confirms Juan Gabriel Vasquez as one of the leading novelists of his generation.

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  Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  One of the most exciting of a new generation of South America authors, Daniel Alarcon tells the story of Norma, a survivor of the brutal civil war who reads out the names of the missing on her radio show every evening. One day a boy from the Peruvian jungle walks in to the station with news of a husband she has not seen for ten years. Powerful, evocative and extremely moving.

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  The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  This epic novel is the story of three generations of women in the Trueba family: Clara the clairvoyant, her daughter Blanca and her granddaughter Alba. A wonderful book full of magic, tragedy, poetry and love, that brings 100 years of Chilean history to life.

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  Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  This part-thriller, part-romance is based on a true story of the disappearance of a little girl called Evangelina from a small village in Chile in 1978. In an entertaining and nail-bitingly tense blend of fact and fiction, it exposes the corruption and violence of the state and the powerlessness of the Chilean people.

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  Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  Dona Flor, recently remarried to a kind, considerate pharmacist, is being haunted by her lascivious, decadent and very much dead first husband. A delightfully funny and romantic book, with that Latin American twist.

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  Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado

  Price: £13.99    Add to Basket

  Gabriela, a poor, migrant worker, turns up in the traditional, rural, Brazilian town of Iheus. The year is 1925 but Gabriela will bring with her a wind of change that will turn this provincial town upside down. This is a warm-hearted, energetic, panoramic novel; equally likely to make you laugh out loud as cry.

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  Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  Known as the Brazilian Othello, this masterpiece from nineteenth century novelist Machado de Assis, tells the story of Bento, a man on the eve of death, describing a life full of love, tragedy and self-deception, narrated in a unique, astonishingly modern style; a classic of Brazilian fiction.

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  The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  Bras Cubas, the ridiculous, amusing, quixotic narrator of this novel, recounts the story of his life from beyond the grave. A wonderful, outrageous book from this master of nineteenth century Brazilian fiction.

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  A Chapter of Hats by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A selection of newly translated short stories that showcase Machado de Assis' searing, elegant prose and paint an evocative picture of 19th century Rio de Janeiro.

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  The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts by Louis de Bernieres

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  The first in Louis de Bernieres' enchanting, magical, funny and moving trilogy set in a fictional Colombia where people turn into giant cats, the president dies on the toilet and vicious drugs barons and the militia cause havoc and destruction. Highly recommended.

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  One Hundred Days: One Hundred Nights by Christopher Bigsby

  Price: £10.00    Add to Basket

  The magical, carnival-like history of a fictional South American country from the moment a lost Nazi U-boat is grounded on its shores in 1944. Fabulous beasts, ridiculous dictators and beautiful girls are brought to life with energy and charm by Christopher Bigsby's elegant prose.

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  Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

  Price: £16.99    Add to Basket

  Probably our most favourite book from this extraordinary, surreal Chilean writer. Insightful and blackly comic, he imagines entirely fictional biographies of right-wing authors.

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  By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  On the last night of his life, Chilean priest and member of Opus Dei, Father Sebastian, recalls his life as a literary critic, repressed homosexual and Marxist teacher to Pinochet. The backdrop to Bolano's satiric masterpiece, is the brutal, violent history of Chile. Highly recommended.

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  House of Mist by Maria Luis Bombal

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  Considered to be one of the earliest examples of magical realism, House of Mist tells the story of a young bride trapped in a loveless to marriage to a distant man obsessed with his first wife, and their life together in a house in the Chilean woods. Carlos Fuentes described the author as 'the mother of us all.'

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  Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

  Price: £17.99    Add to Basket

  A collection of fiction from marvellous, magical Jorge Luis Borges, poetic and dreamlike short stories spanning his career from 1935 to his most recent story 'Shakespeare's Memory'.

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  The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  Borges' enchanting and amusing commentary on imaginary beasts from the Brownies to the Valkyries, from the Three Legged Ass to the Eight-forked Serpent. Wonderful for children and adults alike.

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  The City of Your Final Destination by Peter Cameron

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  On the insistence of his somewhat overbearing girlfriend, Omar Razaghi travels to Uruguay to convince the family of a recently deceased South American author that he should be writing this man's biography. The comic, warm-hearted and romantic story of Omar's entangled adventures.

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  Tales from the Town of Widows by James Canon

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  When the men are forcibly recruited by guerrillas, the women of a remote Colombian village must take matters into their own hands; a moving and enchanting debut.

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  Nine Nights by Bernardo Carvalho

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A young man is driven to the point of insanity trying to uncover the truth behind the suicide of an American ethnologist in Brazil in 1939. Like a paper trail, the American left seven letters each suggesting a different motive for his death, but they lead the narrator into darkness and obsession. A gripping, beautifully-written and disturbing thriller.

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  The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  An exquisite, deeply important piece of South American fiction inspired by H. G. Well's novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. At once a love story, a thriller and a vision of the future, Borges wrote of his friend's work, "to classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." This New York Review edition also includes Casares' remarkable modernist illustrations.

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  Papillon by Henri Charriere

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A classic in prison writing to rival The Count of Monte Cristo, this is the story of Henri Charriere, wrongly committed for murder and sentenced to time in the French penal colony on French Guiana. A story of courage and dogged determination, Charriere refused to be deterred by the brutal conditions and launched a series of unbelievable escape attempts.