The War of the End of the World

In the backcountry of Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, a holy man called the Counsellor has gathered thousands of followers in a community called Canudos — and the newly formed Brazilian Republic has sent four military expeditions to destroy them. What follows is one of the most extraordinary episodes in South American history and the subject of one of the most extraordinary novels in world literature: a war between religious millennialism and secular modernity, between the interior of Brazil and its coastal cities, between two completely incompatible visions of what the country is and should become.

Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World, published in 1981, is his most ambitious novel — vast in scope, intricate in structure, overwhelming in its historical and human detail. It is also, in the truest sense, a masterpiece.

Essential for serious readers of world literature — one of the defining Latin American novels. Published by Faber & Faber.