This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corellis Mandolin is set in an impoverished violent yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere i... » 

This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corellis Mandolin is set in an impoverished violent yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere in South America where the haughty Doa Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool with consequences that are at once tragic heroic and outrageously funny. Of course the local villagers need the river to irrigate their crops while their spokesman the dissolute and epically foulmouthed Don Emmanuel uses it for other unmentionable purposes. And what ensues is a fullblown war in which ragged peasants go up against a brutal soldieryand in which Louis de Bernires displays all his signature gifts high adventure unrestrained comedy a feel for climatic and sexual humidity and prose of rare vibrance and color. «