2023 Read Widely: Central & South America

"Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, Max Weill has never forgotten the atrocities he saw as a prisoner at Auschwitz--nor the face of Dr. Otto Schramm, a camp doctor who worked with Mengele on appalling experiments and who sent Maxs family to the gas chambers. As the war came to a close, Schramm was one of the many high-ranking former-Nazi officers who managed to escape Germany for new lives in South America, where leaders like Argentina's...

In the predawn hours of July 10, 2014, the son of Alaskan scientist and National Geographic Explorer Roman Dial walked alone into Corcovado National Park, an untracked rainforest along Costa Rica's remote Pacific Coast. He carried a light backpack and machete. Cody emailed his father that he would do 4 days in the jungle and a day to walk out. He was never seen again. The authorities suspected murder. Dial was forced to confront the question: Was...

In The Archer we meet Tetsuya, a man once famous for his prodigious gift with a bow and arrow but who has since retired from public life, and the boy who comes searching for him. The boy has many questions, and in answering them Tetsuya illustrates the way of the bow and the tenets of a meaningful life. Paulo Coelho's story suggests that living without a connection between action and soul cannot fulfill, that a life constricted by fear of rejection...

Enter the magical world of La Llorona with New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard. After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano. The Bird Hotel tells the story of this young American who, after suffering tragedy, restores and runs La Llorona. Along the way we meet...

Harold Robbins and Junius Podrug take readers on a wild ride in the exciting, cutthroat world of coffee markets in The Devil to Pay Nash Novak, a struggling Seattle businesswoman who has been framed for arson and murder, is in desperate need of money for her defense. The only way for her to get it: A coffee plantation she has inherited. But, there's a catch: She has to run the plantation, deep in the jungles of Colombia, a land of drug lords and...

Set in an unnamed slum in contemporary Argentina, Earth-eater is the story of a young woman who finds herself drawn to eating the earth--a compulsion that gives her visions of broken and lost lives. With her first taste of dirt, she learns the horrifying truth of her mother's death. Disturbed by what she witnesses, the woman keeps her visions to herself. But when Earth-eater begins an unlikely relationship with a withdrawn police officer, word of...

A young wife relocates with her financier husband to São Paulo, where she encounters crime, protests, refugees, gentrification, and the collision of art and commerce while confronting the crisis slowly building inside her own marriage.

Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who wants to become a writer and sets off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life: first on the famous "Death Train"...

Moving their family to what they believe will be a safer but temporary home in Houston, two young parents are forced to choose between an undocumented status in America and returning to the violence of war-torn Bogotá.