Colonial Brazil, 1604: a Guarani warrior of impossible devotion, a forbidden love across two worlds, a fortress under siege — and a river rising to end everything.
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The founding romance of Brazil — a noble indigenous warrior who would die for a Portuguese nobleman’s daughter — set in the wild forests above Rio in the year 1604.
Peri, chief of the Guaraní, saves the golden-haired Ceci and devotes his whole life to her; her father’s fortified house sits in a paradise slowly turning to danger, ringed by rival tribes, greedy adventurers, and a villain plotting in the shadows. Alencar was inventing a national mythology — the New World’s own Eden, its own noble hero — as Brazil was inventing itself.
Adventure, forbidden love across two worlds, treachery, and a finale of flood and fire that reads like the birth of a legend. It became an opera by Carlos Gomes that played La Scala; generations of Brazilians grew up on Peri and Ceci.
You watch a country dream itself into being — and the lush Portuguese, read word for word, carries you straight into the forest with it.
The words that carry the book. Learn these and most of the text opens up; each links, in the reader, to its full entry. Counts are how often the word appears.
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