Brazil: A Biography

With great skill the authors have managed to combine clarity and consistency, substance and fluency, historical precision and a text that is a joy to read

Lira Neto

A thoughtful and profound journey into the soul of Brazil...The Brazil that emerges from this book is, indeed, a fascinating, complex, multicoloured, contradictory and challenging organism, more like a living being than a political, cultural and geographical entity

Laurentino Gomes, Folha de São Paulo

Engrossing ... eye-opening ... an enormously refreshing treat

Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

Coinciding with the election of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, this epic history of the world's sixth most populous country is a shocking, dramatic and utterly engrossing read. The details of Brazil's history, from the 19th-century empire to the suicide of the quasi-fascist dictator Getulio Vargas, are largely unknown to British readers, but that only makes its dark story all the more fascinating.

The Sunday Times, Books of the Year

Detailed and deeply reasoned . . . Illuminating, engrossing, and consistently thoughtful.

Larry Rohter, The New York Review of Books

Compelling and insightful . . . One of Schwarcz and Starling's great strengths is their dissection of changing racial identity.

Geoff Dyer, Financial Times

Evocative . . . Schwarcz and Starling adopt what they call a biographical approach: an attempt to tell the collective stories of the generations of Brazilians that have lived . . . They achieve this with flair in their rich evocations of colonial and imperial Brazil . . . Rich and absorbing.

Patrick Wilcken, The Times Literary Supplement