Books like The Autumn of the Patriarch
A decaying Caribbean dictator whose reign has lasted over a century recalls his lovers, his enemies, and the loneliness of absolute power.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Autumn of the Patriarch
The President
In a Central American capital ruled by a nameless dictator, the murder of an army officer sets off a wave of persecution that reaches the president's own favourite.
Shame
In a country that is and is not Pakistan, two feuding politicians' families are bound by marriage to a girl whose blushes of shame turn into violence.
The Obscene Bird of Night
Humberto Peñaloza, a failed writer turned servant who calls himself Mudito, narrates from a crumbling Santiago house of retreat for old women, retelling his service to an aristocratic family and the deformed heir they hid away on an estate peopled by monsters.
Conversation in the Cathedral
Santiago Zavala, a journalist, runs into his father's old chauffeur Ambrosio in Lima, and over four hours in a bar called La Catedral they go back over the Odría dictatorship and what it did to them both.
The House of the Spirits
Four generations of the Trueba family across a thinly-veiled twentieth-century Chile, from a telepathic grandmother to the military coup that takes her granddaughter into a basement.
In Evil Hour
In a small Colombian town under a military mayor, anonymous lampoons start appearing on doors overnight, exposing the residents' secrets, and one of them leads to a killing.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and fall in the mythical town of Macondo, where miracles are mundane and history is a spiral.
Distant Star
A narrator looks back on a charismatic young poet in 1970s Chile who, after the coup, reappears as an air force pilot skywriting verses and is linked to the disappearance of women.
Men of Maize
In the highlands of Guatemala, Gaspar Ilóm leads his Mayan people against the ladino farmers burning the forest to plant maize for profit, and the story spreads into myth.
Praiseworthy
In the small northern town of Praiseworthy, under a haze cloud that won't lift, Cause Man Steel dreams of moving goods across a warming world by donkey, while his son Tommyhawk dreams of a white future.
Dog Years
The friendship of Walter Matern and Eddi Amsel, two boys from a village near Danzig, from the 1920s through the Nazi years and after, told by three narrators and shadowed by a line of black dogs.
The Kingdom of This World
Ti Noël, an enslaved man in French Saint-Domingue, lives through the Haitian Revolution and the reign of King Henri Christophe, in a novel full of the marvellous real.