Ashes of the Amazon

"The story of a long rebellion and the struggle to understand it. The rebel is Mundo, the embittered offshoot of a family split down the middle. The attempt to understand him falls to Lavo, a hard-working orphan who betters himself under the influence of Mundo's father.However, the symbolic heart of the book lies not so much in Manaus and the final years of a boom produced by the merciless exploitation of the forest, but further down the great river, in Vila Amazonia, the centre of a jute plantation and Mundo's worst nightmare.In his lifelong struggle to escape from his father's dynastic ambitions, Mundo distances himself as much as possible from this dead-centre of the novel, taking the plot to Rio de Janeiro and the effervescent worlds of Berlin and London in the 1970s. This beautiful, mature and bitter novel is the extraordinary result." -- BOOK JACKET.