Patria
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Summary
An adventurous, dazzling and original history that brings South America’s epic past and fascinating present to life
'Romantic, adventurous and thrilling ... remarkable' Telegraph
'Vivid, fast-paced and wonderfully ambitious … Patria teems with alternative stories of a continent’s life and peoples' New Internationalist
Patria tells an alternative history of South America, spanning thousands of miles and five centuries to the present. Looking beyond modern borders, Laurence Blair takes as his waymarks nine countries that can’t be found on a map: vanished realms, half-imagined utopias and dismembered homelands.
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 – including 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.
'An unputdownable delight' JON LEE ANDERSON
'Constantly surprising and always enticing' HARRIET RIX
'Romantic, adventurous and thrilling ... remarkable' Telegraph
'Vivid, fast-paced and wonderfully ambitious … Patria teems with alternative stories of a continent’s life and peoples' New Internationalist
Patria tells an alternative history of South America, spanning thousands of miles and five centuries to the present. Looking beyond modern borders, Laurence Blair takes as his waymarks nine countries that can’t be found on a map: vanished realms, half-imagined utopias and dismembered homelands.
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 – including 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.
'An unputdownable delight' JON LEE ANDERSON
'Constantly surprising and always enticing' HARRIET RIX
Reviews
Extraordinary … [t]his debut turns the familiar story of South America’s origins inside out … There’s something oneiric about South America in Blair’s storytelling; its broiling jungles, smothering cloud forests and desiccated badlands are landscapes on which dreams are built on. … Romantic, adventurous and thrilling, Patria achieves something remarkable. Not only does Blair bring the stink and splendour of these “forgotten nations” to pungent life, but he also forces us to consider how, and why, they came to be lost in the first place. His travels deserve their own TV series. And his book’s import deserves a wide hearing – that to ignore South America’s past is to ignore the planet’s future.
Alex Diggins, The Telegraph
