In Ashes of the Amazon, Milton Hatoum takes to heart Flaubert’s injunction to write ‘the moral history of his generation’, with extraordinary results. The book itself was longlisted for the *2010 IMPAC Prize*, and is the story of a long rebellion and the struggle to understand it.Mundo is a rebel – the embittered offshoot of a rich family, whose artistic vocation clashes with his father’s dynastic plans. Ashes of the Amazon charts his determined flight from the fraught centre of his family’s wealth – the Vila Amazonia plantation – through Rio de Janeiro, and then to the effervescent worlds of 1970s Berlin and London. This is a beautiful, mature and involving novel from one of the most important South American writers of his time.