From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a novel of exile, displacement, and the agonizing cruelty and pain of colonialism, both for those who rule and those who are their victims. “A brilliant novel in every way.… [It] shimmers with artistic certainty.” —The New York Times Book Review Set on a troubled Carribbean island, where “everybody wants to fight his own little war,” where “everyone is a guerrilla,” the novel centers on an Englishman named Roche, once a hero of the South African resistance, who has come to the island – subdued now, almost withdrawn – to work and to help. Soon his English mistress arrives: casually nihilistic, bored, quickly enticed – excited – by fantasies of native power and sexuality, and blindly unaware of any possible consequences of her acts. At once Roche and Jane are drawn into fatal connection with a young guerrilla leader named Jimmy Ahmed, a man driven by his own raging fantasies of power, of perverse sensuality, and of the England he half remembers, half sentimentalizes. Against the larger anguish of the world they inhabit, these three act out a drama of death, hideous sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that profoundly reflects the ravages history can make on human lives.

In this comparative survey of guerrilla movements in Latin America, Timothy Wickham-Crowley explores the origins and outcomes of rural insurgencies in nearly a dozen cases since 1956. Focusing on the personal backgrounds of the guerrillas themselves and on national social conditions, the author explains why guerrillas emerged strongly in certain countries but not others. He considers, for example, under what circumstances guerrillas acquire military strength and why they do--or do not--secure substantial support from the peasantry in rural areas.

As fitting for the 21st century as von Clausewitz's "On War" was in its own time, "Invisible Armies" is a complete global history of guerrilla uprisings through the ages.