The dramatic life of the revolutionary hero Bolivar, who liberated South America - a sweeping narrative worthy of a Hollywood epic.

The dramatic life of the revolutionary hero Bolivar, who liberated South America - a sweeping narrative worthy of a Hollywood epic.

Simón Bolivar's life makes for one of history's most dramatic canvases, a colossal narrative filled with adventure and disaster, victory and defeat. This is the story not just of an extraordinary man but of the liberation of a continent.

A larger-than-life figure from a tumultuous age, Bolívar ignited a revolution, liberated six countries from Spanish rule and is revered as the great hero of South American history. In a sweeping narrative worthy of a Hollywood epic, BOLIVAR colourfully portrays this extraordinarily dramatic life. From his glorious battlefield victories to his legendary love affairs, Bolívar emerges as a man of many facets: fearless and inspiring general, consummate diplomat, passionate abolitionist and gifted writer.

"The case for Bolívar as one of the world's most extraordinary 19th-century leaders is well made by Marie Arana ... Arana's prose is often beautiful. A novelist turned historian, she tells Bolívar's story wonderfully ... Two centuries after his death, Bolívar inflames passions that better-known characters no longer ignite. Arana's biography explains why." - THE OBSERVER

"I suspect that one reason why her biography is so plausible and engagingly told is that the Peruvian-born Arana is herself a writer of fiction. Like Garcia Marquez (who memorably fictionalised Bolivar in The General in his Labyrinth), she has an instinct for the vitalising detail...As well, his sad and contradictory story demands a novelist's empathy." - DAILY TELEGRAPH

"Arana's account of Bolivar leading his rag-bag army across the dizzying heights of the Paramo de Pisba - a virtual wall of ice and scree - is gripping stuff...Equally compelling are Arana's accounts of Bolivar's countless affairs, especially with his principal mistress, Manuela Saenz, whose ambiguous sexuality and scandalous behaviour earned her notoriety across Bolivar's vast fiefdom." - MAIL ON SUNDAY

"Marie Arana has done a superb job...with a biography that is as enjoyable as a novel, capturing the imagination with its fluid prose and the power of the drama that unfolded as the age of revolution reached Spanish America." - THE TABLET

"Thrilling, authoritative and revelatory, here at last is a biography of Bolivar, the maker of South America, that catches the sheer extraordinary unique adventure and titanic scale of his life with accessible narrative and scholarly judgement." - Simon Sebag Montefiore

"

Arana is an indefatigable researcher, a perceptive historian, and a luminous writer, as shown in her
defining, exhilarating biography of the great South American liberator Simón Bolívar.

"The George Washington of South America cuts a dashing though dark-edged and ultimately tragic figure in this rousing biography. Peruvian journalist Arana (American Chica) chronicles Gen. Simón Bolívar's struggle against the Spanish Empire in the 1810s and '20s through several dizzying cycles of battlefield victory, triumphal procession, demoralizing reversal, and squalid exile, before he finally drove imperial forces out of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Her vivid portrait shows us a charismatic man of high ideals, fiery oratory, unflagging energy and resolve, bold strategies, and a romantic aura-"he rode, ragged and shirtless... his wild long hair riding the wind"-that women found irresistible." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (USA)

"Inspired. . . . Arana ably captures the brash brilliance of this revered and vilified leader." - KIRKUS REVIEWS (USA)

"In "Bolívar: American Liberator," Bolívar emerges as a complex and confounding human being. He was the essential figure in the revolutionary wars that created five South American countries. Brilliant and erudite, he was an idealist and also a ruthless military leader as well as a deeply charismatic a man of letters" - LOS ANGELES TIMES (USA)

"Bolivar" is a monumental achievement destined to win some major literary prizes. Like most recent books on the North American founders, it assumes that all icons are also flawed creatures. All of Bolivar's flaws are on display here - his inveterate womanizing, periodic bouts of arrogance, flirtation with Napoleonic versions of omnipotence. But if Jefferson is eventually proved right, and democracy does come to Latin America in full form, the man so brilliantly recovered in these pages will be shouting hosannas from the heavens. - WASHINGTON POST (USA)

"Arana's zestful biography is as action-packed as it is authoritative" - THE TIMES

"Marie Arana has read all the extant archives and has written an admirable, action-filled life. She follows Bolivar from his rich, aristocratic birth, early losses of mother and then child-bride, to his political awakening and rush into action. Her biography is so close to experience that we are back with Bolivar himself, "exuberant mustache and dazzling smile", almost feeling the wind as he passes." - THE INDEPENDENT

"Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, still casts a long shadow in his native Latin America, almost too mythic to have been an actual man. Beautifully written, Bolivar reads like a great work of fiction, yet this book is a well-researched major work of history." - THE LADY

"Marie Arana makes a gripping tale from the life story of Simon Bolivar, the dramatic but controversial son of Spanish America." - LITERARY REVIEW

"Now we have this splendid new biography by Marie Arana, a Peruvian scholar long established as a literary journalist in the United States." - HISTORY TODAY