Patria : Lost Countries of South America

Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award

In this sweeping exploration of the continent's forgotten past, Laurence Blair takes as his waymarks nine countries that can't be found on a map: vanished realms, half-imagined utopias and dismembered homelands. Looking beyond modern borders, he travels to each in turn – on foot and horseback, by rail and river – to weave an epic of survival, resistance and revolution.

Blair's journey spans five centuries and thousands of miles, ranging from ancient Amazonian civilisations and a rebel Inca dynasty in the Peruvian jungle – via a Brazilian Wakanda that defied slavery, Bolivia's landlocked navy and the Patagonian power that defeated the Spanish Empire – to the African freedom fighters who marched over the Andes from Argentina, and the Napoleon of the New World who led Paraguay to its ruin.

This is the story of South America as is rarely told: at the epicentre of global history and the forging of the modern world.