The Violent Land

From the great Brazilian author, an exotic tale of greed, madness, and a dispute between two powerful families over land on the cocoa-rich coast of Bahia The siren song of the lush, cocoa-growing forests of Bahia lures them all—the adventurers, the assassins, the gamblers, the brave and beautiful women. It is not a gentle song, but a song of greed, madness, and blood. It is a song that promises riches untold, or death for the price of a swig of rum . . . a song most cannot resist—until it is too late—not Margot, the golden blond prostitute who comes for love; not Cabral, the unscrupulous lawyer who works for one of the Cacao “colonels”; and not Juca, whose ruthless quest to reap the jungle’s harvest plants the seeds of his own destruction.

Jorge Amado (1912–2001) was born in the state of Bahia, Brazil, whose society he portrays in such acclaimed novels as Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.  Samuel Putnam (1892–1950) was a translator and scholar of Romance languages, famous for his English translation of Don Quixote.
Alfred Mac Adam is a professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College and Columbia University. He lives in New York.