Daughter of the Rivers

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In his second novel, Ilko Minev takes his readers back to the Amazon of the 1960s, where Benjamim Melul, grandson of a once powerful rubber baron, pursues his dream of reviving the glory days of Brazil's early 20th-century rubber boom. He and his wife Nina move to the family's abandoned plantation deep in the Amazon, near the border with Bolivia. They are joined in their adventure by a young couple, Adriano and Maria, both denizens of the forest. After five disappointing years of hard toil and little profit, the two couples are preparing to return to civilization with their young families when tragedy strikes, leaving the green-eyed "cabocla" Maria alone and with three small children to care for. Fighting to survive in one of the most isolated, inhospitable corners of the world, she eventually lands in the rough prospecting "garimpos" of the Amazon, where she first works for Dona Sandra, madam of a brothel, and then for Oleg Hazan, a Bulgarian immigrant determined to strike it rich mining for river gold. Readers of Minev's first book, "As Flowers Go," will recognize the protagonists Licco, Oleg, and David, who transport us even deeper into the magical Amazon on this second journey.