Seeds of Suffering-III: A Historical Novel of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

From 1631 to 1763, the Portuguese Empire and the Catholic Church continue their reign over the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As the conquering conquistadors wield their power over the city’s politics, economics, and thriving slave regime, oppression and corruption are the driving forces behind these numerous and diverse stories of personal suffering.

Slaves, desperate for freedom, escape their owners and flee the metropolis to establish their own hidden communities, called mocambos. Kimbakala, a Congo native, is one of these runaway slaves, and he must use his strength and intuition to maintain his position as chief of his own mocambo. In the heart of the city, Rebecca is Jewish and a victim of the powerful Father Pequeno’s bigotry and loathing for her kind. On the shores, the fisherman Tristao, abandoned as a baby and raised by slaves, struggles into manhood.

Whether impoverished or elite, each inhabitant must try to navigate the endless dangers, twists, and turns that come with living in eighteenth-century Rio.

This third volume of the Seeds of Suffering series continues its unflinching depiction of the human desire for money, power, love, and ultimately survival—set in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

Douglas Reid Copeland is a novelist who was educated at Westminster College in Missouri and has lived in, and visited, over sixty countries.

Born in Brazil to American parents in 1947, he grew up in the Ipanema zone of Rio de Janeiro. Suffering mental trauma, child abuse, sexual abuse, psychological and frontal castration, toxic shame, neglect, and indifference during his formative and teenage years, Copeland developed chronic issues that marginalized him from society.

Only after his arrest in 1989 did he receive the help he needed to recover from his nightmarish life. After several years of probation and treatment via Dr. Fred Berlin's recovery program at Johns Hopkins, as well as twenty years of psychiatric therapy, medications, and twelve-step programs, Copeland is finally experiencing the freedom of redemption.