Publisher's Synopsis
An adventurous, dazzling and original continent-sized history that brings South America's untold past and fascinating present to life.
Patria tells an alternative history of South America, spanning five centuries and taking as its waymarks nine vanished and half-imagined realms. Laurence Blair travels to each in turn - on foot and horseback, by rail and river - to trace their rise, fall, and unexpected afterlives.
Blair's journey ranges from ancient Amazonian city-states and a rebel Inca dynasty in the jungle - via a Brazilian Wakanda that defied slavery, Bolivia's landlocked navy, and the Patagonian power that defeated the Spanish - to fall in with the African freedom fighters who marched over the Andes, and the New World Napoleon who led Paraguay to its ruin.
Groundbreaking recent scholarship, striking archaeological discoveries and vivid eyewitness reporting - as well as encounters with drug lords, Indigenous leaders, refugees and former guerrillas - weave a story of survival, resistance and revolution, restoring South America to the centre of world history.
