In the midst of life and at the point of real happiness in the South of Spain, I am being separated unexpectedly in the cruelest way from my son and this dream life. A trip to Brazil ends in a nightmare of prison with my arrest due to a trap I ran into. For months, I live in a state of shock and cannot cope with the terrible prison conditions. I find out that I had been betrayed and have to realize that I have lost my son forever. My boyfriend Luciano lets me down as well as my own family. Only my father is full of grief, he passes away because his heart breaks knowing me being in prison. My pleadings not to tell him anything are being ignored. I decide to end my life, which is not a dignified life anymore in this hell of a prison where I am locked up in a small space with about 160 other women crowded together.

Unexpectedly Rita survives, building a strong will to stay alive. With help of some inmates she can make it through the hell of Aruja. But the grief over her son keeps throwing her into deep depressions. Her soul is ill and so becomes her body. Even though it is the living hell she learns real friendship and people caring for one another. Then new hope arises by the transfer to the State prison of Säo Paulo where she has the opportunity to work and study. But first she has to stay with all other new inmates in the Estágio, the isolation from other prisoners. Here Rita learns that this place is not like Aruja and has to cope with terror, jealousy and hatred of others. Constant bad news about her son are bringing her more down than she already is. After moving to another cell she begins to work but it is not what she expected. Beside her work she has to cope now with every day terror inside the cell. Soon she realizes that nothing here is better than Aruja, contrary, it is far worse....

The End centers on five friends in Rio de Janeiro who, nearing the end of their lives, are left with memories—of parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the physical indignities of aging. Alvaro lives alone and spends his time going from doctor to doctor and bemoaning the evils of his ex-wife. Silvio is a junkie who can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs even in his old age. Ribeiro is an athletic beach bum enjoying a prolonged sex life thanks to Viagra. Neto is the square member of the group, a faithful husband until his last days. And Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die, struck down by cancer. For all of them, successful careers, personal revelations, and Zen serenity are out of the question, blocked by a seemingly insurmountable wall of frustrations. Orbiting around them are a priest questioning his vocation and a cast of complicated women, neglected and embattled by these self-involved men. Edgy and wise, this tragicomic debut delves into taboo subjects—death, infidelity, impotence, the difficulties of marriage—with unsentimental honesty, and brings Rio and these characters to life in full color.

Beginning to End Hunger presents the story of Belo Horizonte, home to 2.5 million people and the site of one of the world’s most successful city-run food security programs. Since its Municipal Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security was founded in 1993, Belo Horizonte has sharply reduced malnutrition, leading it to serve as an inspiration for Brazil’s renowned Zero Hunger programs. The secretariat’s work with local family farmers shows how food security, rural livelihoods, and healthy ecosystems can be supported together. While inevitably imperfect, Belo Horizonte offers a vision of a path away from food system dysfunction, unsustainability, and hunger. In this convincing case study, M. Jahi Chappell establishes the importance of holistic approaches to food security, suggests how to design successful policies to end hunger, and lays out strategies for enacting policy change. With these tools, we can take the next steps toward achieving similar reductions in hunger and food insecurity elsewhere in the developed and developing worlds.

The rural labor movement played a surprisingly active role in Brazil's transition to democracy in the 1980s. While in most Latin American countries rural labor was conspicuously marginal, in Brazil, an expanded, secularized, and centralized movement organized strikes, staged demonstrations for land reform, demanded political liberalization, and criticized the government’s environmental policies. In this ground-breaking book, Anthony W. Pereira explains this transition as the result of two intertwined processes - the modernization of agricultural production and the expansion of the welfare state into the countryside - and explores the political consequences of these processes, occurring not only in Latin America but in much of the Third World.

A Nazi hunter uncovers a fugitive SS doctor’s terrifying plot to create a Fourth Reich in The Boys from Brazil, a riveting techno-thriller from the incomparable master of suspense, Ira Levin. Veteran Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann finds himself entangled in a web of unimaginable horror when he is tipped off to a sinister conspiracy hatching in the depths of South America: a plan to establish a new, globe-spanning Fourth Reich. Why has Dr. Josef Mengele—Auschwitz’s fiendish “Angel of Death”—tasked a team of former SS men with the slaughter of ninety-four harmless, aging men across the globe? What hidden link binds these men together? What significance could they possibly hold for their pursuers? With the clock ticking, and the future of humanity hanging in the balance, can the ailing Liebermann take on a seemingly unstoppable enemy and alter the course of history? Adapted into the film starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil is a gripping, thought-provoking thriller that explores the depths of human malevolence, and the eternal struggle between good and evil.

Marian Lindberg grew up being told that Walter Lindberg, the man who raised her father, was a brave explorer who had been murdered in the Amazon. She took her father’s claims at face value, basking in her exotic roots, until she started to notice things. The unverified legend became a riddle she couldn’t solve. As Lindberg moved from journalism to law, fell in love, and sought a family of her own, her father repeatedly interfered. He had a closed vision of his family, and she—unlike the silent Walter—was breaking out. Yet her father’s story of the past haunted Lindberg. Long after her father’s death, Lindberg set off for the Amazon, determined to find out the truth about Walter. Aided by generous Brazilians who adopted her search as if it were their own, she discovered as much about herself and her family as about Walter, whose true role in Brazil’s history turned out to be unexpected and deeply troubling. Sharply observant, wrought with honesty, and sweeping in its ambitions, The End of the Rainy Season is a powerful examination of identity and human relationships with nature, and between one another.