A Brazilian Lord of the Flies, about a group of boys who live by their wits and daring in the slums of Bahia
A Penguin Classics
They call themselves “Captains of the Sands,” a gang of orphans and runaways who live by their wits and daring in the torrid slums and sleazy back alleys of Bahia. Led by fifteen-year-old “Bullet,” the band—including a crafty liar named “Legless,” the intellectual “Professor,” and the sexually precocious “Cat”—pulls off heists and escapades against the right and privileged of Brazil. But when a public outcry demands the capture of the “little criminals,” the fate of these children becomes a poignant, intensely moving drama of love and freedom in a shackled land.
Captains of the Sands captures the rich culture, vivid emotions, and wild landscape of Bahia with penetrating authenticity and brilliantly displays the genius of Brazil’s most acclaimed author.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
“Amado was writing to save his country’s soul. . . . The scenes where the captains of the sands manage to fool the rich of the city and get away with it would have made Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens proud.” —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction
“Indispensable . . . if you want to feel the intensity of life on the streets of Salvador.” —Itamar Vieira Junior, The New York Times
"Amado is Brazil's most illustrious and venerable novelist."—The New York Times
“Brazil’s leading man of letters . . . Amado is adored around the world!” —Newsweek
Jorge Amado—novelist, journalist, lawyer—was born in 1912, the son of a cacao planter, in Ilheus, south of Salvador, the provincial capital of Gabriela, clavo y canela. His first novel, Cacao, was published when he was 19. It was an impassioned plea for social justice for the workers on Bahian cacao plantations; and his novels of the ’30s and ’40s would continue to dramatize class struggle. Not until the 1950s did he write his great literary comic novels—Gabriela, clavo y canela and Doña Flor y sus dos maridos—which take aim at the full spectrum of society even as they pay ebullient tribute to the region of his birth. One of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the ’60s, Amado has been translated into more than 35 languages. A highly successful film version of Doña Flor was produced in Brazil in 1976. He died in 2001.
View titles by Jorge Amado
A Brazilian Lord of the Flies, about a group of boys who live by their wits and daring in the slums of Bahia
A Penguin Classics
They call themselves “Captains of the Sands,” a gang of orphans and runaways who live by their wits and daring in the torrid slums and sleazy back alleys of Bahia. Led by fifteen-year-old “Bullet,” the band—including a crafty liar named “Legless,” the intellectual “Professor,” and the sexually precocious “Cat”—pulls off heists and escapades against the right and privileged of Brazil. But when a public outcry demands the capture of the “little criminals,” the fate of these children becomes a poignant, intensely moving drama of love and freedom in a shackled land.
Captains of the Sands captures the rich culture, vivid emotions, and wild landscape of Bahia with penetrating authenticity and brilliantly displays the genius of Brazil’s most acclaimed author.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Praise
“Amado was writing to save his country’s soul. . . . The scenes where the captains of the sands manage to fool the rich of the city and get away with it would have made Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens proud.” —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction
“Indispensable . . . if you want to feel the intensity of life on the streets of Salvador.” —Itamar Vieira Junior, The New York Times
"Amado is Brazil's most illustrious and venerable novelist."—The New York Times
“Brazil’s leading man of letters . . . Amado is adored around the world!” —Newsweek
Author
Jorge Amado—novelist, journalist, lawyer—was born in 1912, the son of a cacao planter, in Ilheus, south of Salvador, the provincial capital of Gabriela, clavo y canela. His first novel, Cacao, was published when he was 19. It was an impassioned plea for social justice for the workers on Bahian cacao plantations; and his novels of the ’30s and ’40s would continue to dramatize class struggle. Not until the 1950s did he write his great literary comic novels—Gabriela, clavo y canela and Doña Flor y sus dos maridos—which take aim at the full spectrum of society even as they pay ebullient tribute to the region of his birth. One of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the ’60s, Amado has been translated into more than 35 languages. A highly successful film version of Doña Flor was produced in Brazil in 1976. He died in 2001.
View titles by Jorge Amado
