Erico Verissimo · 1949 · overland

Erico Verissimo's trilogy, two hundred years of Rio Grande do Sul told through one family. It begins in the Jesuit missions in 1745 and ends in the twentieth century, and the town at its centre, Santa Fe, is modelled on Cruz Alta, where Verissimo was born. The men go off to the wars; the women hold the house.

1. 1
   The Sete Povos das Missoes

   The Guarani missions on the disputed border between Portugal and Spain, and the war that destroys them - where Pedro Missioneiro is born to an indigenous mother and raised by a Spanish priest, with visions he cannot explain.

2. 2
   Santa Fe

   Ana Terra walks out of the ruins of her family with a child and nothing else, and helps found a settlement on the campo - the invented town at the centre of the whole saga, built on Verissimo's own Cruz Alta.

3. 3
   The Farroupilha

   Captain Rodrigo Cambara rides into Santa Fe as a stranger, marries Bibiana and goes off to the ten-year republican war - which is the pattern the family repeats for two centuries: the men leave, and some of them come back.

4. 4
   The Paraguayan War

   North into Paraguay with another generation of Cambaras, in the bloodiest war South America has fought - and the novel keeps cutting home to the women running the house and the land while it happens.

5. 5
   The Sobrado

   1895, and the family's great house in Santa Fe is besieged by federalist forces while Licurgo holds it - the frame the whole trilogy hangs on, a siege of a few days containing a hundred and fifty years.

6. 6
   Porto Alegre

   The last volume moves to the capital and into the twentieth century, Vargas and the modern state - and the wind that gives the book its title still going over the same grass, which is Verissimo's whole point.