Brazil

Brazil is the first work of fiction to depict five centuries of a great nation's remarkable history. With a stunning cast of real and fictional characters, this unforgettable epic unfolds in South America, Africa and Europe.

Lacing the tale together are the shifting fortunes of two dissimilar Brazilian families. The Cavalcantis are among the original Portuguese settlers and carve a gracious plantation out of the Pernambuco wilderness of the north - the classic Brazilian casa grande, vast, powerful, and built with slave labor. The da Silvas of mixed Portuguese and Tupiniquin blood are a spirited family of dreamers, pathfinders, soldiers and entrepreneurs. For generations, they set their eyes on El Dorado, a vision of wealth ultimately achieved in a huge financial empire that makes them power brokers in the new Brazil.

Brazil is an intensely human story, brutal and violent, tender and passionate. Perilous explorations through the Brazilian wilderness...the perpetual clash of pioneer and native, visionary and fortune hunter, master and slave, zealot and exploiter...the thunder of war on land and sea as European powers and South American nations pursue their territorial conquests...the triumphs and tragedies of a people who built a nation covering half the South American continent...all are here in one spellbinding saga.

The principal characters, both real and imaginary, are hard to forget. Among them: the great Indian warrior-chief Aruana; Amador da Silva, a bandeirante 'flag-bearing' pioneer and emerald hunter; Secundus Proot, a Dutch artist-adventurer in the Amazon; Black Peter, a freed African slave who takes murderous revenge on his persecutors; Antonio Paciencia, a brave soldier and humble hero of the landless; Francisco Lopez, doomed and gallant president of Paraguay; Anthony the Counselor of Canudos, visionary rebel of the backlands.

The result is an unsentimentalized historical novel that combines adventure with an impressive level of research and depicts Brazil free from the eternal stereotypes

An Illustrated Guide to the Novel offers a wealth of images and maps and access to the writer's private journal bringing a unique insight into the novel and its creativity.

"Uys has accomplished what no Brazilian author from José de Alencar to Jorge Amado was able to do. He is the first outsider with the total honesty and sympathy to write our national epic in all its decisive episodes. Descriptions like those of the war with Paraguay do not find in our literature any rival capable of surpassing them." - Professor Wilson Martins, Jornal do Brasil

Errol Lincoln Uys is the author of the epic historical novel, Brazil, and non-fiction Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression, which Amazon's History Editor picked as one of the 10 Best Books of 1999.

Growing up in South Africa, Uys (pronounced 'Ace') was ten when he penned his first novella, Revenge, on the back of stock certificates tossed out by his mother. His journey to a writing career was anything but conventional: He sold teddy bears and hula hoops on the streets of Johannesburg, worked at a dolls' hospital, ran a missing persons' bureau, made cane furniture, and spent two years as a law clerk - all before the age of 21.

When he joined the Johannesburg Star, his first published article was an op-ed piece, Happiness is an Unprejudiced Mind. His newspaper and magazine career spanned three continents. He was editor of the Cape Town edition of Post, South Africa's biggest weekly; he pounded the streets of South-East London, as chief reporter for the Mercury. Recruited by Reader's Digest, he returned to his birthplace to found and become editor-in-chief of the Digest's South African edition.

A move to the Digest's U.S. headquarters as senior editor at Pleasantville led to a two-year assignment with James A. Michener on his South African novel, The Covenant.

Uys devoted five years to the writing of Brazil. He spent a year on his research in libraries in the U.S. and Europe. He traveled extensively in Portugal and Brazil, where he journeyed 15,000 miles, almost exclusively by bus.

Uys's non-fiction book, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression tells the story of a quarter million teenage hoboes roaming America in the 1930s.

Now a United States citizen, Uys lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, Janette, whom he met in a Johannesburg park, when he was six years old and not quite ready to begin selling teddy bears!