Milton Hatoum – författare

Set in the great Brazilian port of Manaus during the golden decades of the Rubber Boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is the story of identical twin brothers who battle for the love of their mother. It is also a vivid and surprising portrait of a city built over the confluence of two great rivers in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, and the novel itself is full of eddies, dangerous undertows and shifting surface reflections. While recounting the fortunes and trials of this Lebanese immigrant family over many decades, "The Brothers" also delivers a wealth of sensations to the reader: a city full of smells (diesel fuel, oxen entrails, flowering jasmine), of sounds (the cries of vendors, the butchered sheep, the steady heartbeat of boat motors) and tastes (of tropical fruit, of Arab sweets, of blood) as well as an array of sights. Tense and richly atmospheric, "The Brothers" is an enthralling novel.

Mundo is a rebel - the embittered offshoot of a rich family, whose artistic vocation clashes with his father's dynastic plans. Ashes of the Amazon charts his determined flight from the fraught centre of his family's wealth - the Vila Amazonia plantation - through Rio de Janeiro, and then to the effervescent worlds of 1970s Berlin and London. In Ashes of the Amazon, Hatoum takes to heart Flaubert's injunction to write 'the moral history of his generation', with extraordinary results. This is a beautiful, mature and involving novel from one of the most important South American writers of his time.