From the great Brazilian author, an exotic tale of greed, madness, and a dispute between two powerful families over land on the cocoa-rich coast of Bahia

A Penguin Classic

The siren song of the lush, cocoa-growing forests of Bahia lures them all-the adventurers, the assassins, the gamblers, the brave and beautiful women. It is not a gentle song, but a song of greed, madness, and blood. It is a song that promises riches untold, or death for the price of a swig of rum . . . a song most cannot resist-until it is too late-not Margot, the golden blond prostitute who comes for love; not Cabral, the unscrupulous lawyer who works for one of the Cacao colonels; and not Juca, whose ruthless quest to reap the jungle's harvest plants the seeds of his own destruction.

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