While Licco Hazan, the narrator of this novel, was held captive at a Bulgarian labor camp in World War II, he could hardly imagine that one day hed have a much brighter future in the far-off, frightening Amazon.

Accompanying the lives of this character and his family and people, Ilko Minev reconstructs the little-known and intriguing story of how Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews were saved from the gas chambers during the heinous Nazi domination of Europe. Torn apart from his brother as a young prisoner, Licco is fortunate enough to count on people who help him flee to the neutral nation of...

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...