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
