num_pages: 372
description: "This work can be described tersely but not unfairly as a contribution to the debate on Brazilian self-definition, rendered ineffective by being cast in the form of pastoral. Amado's theme is the life of the Bahian poor: not the whole of their lives, for we seldom glimpse them at the back-breaking work that must occupy some of their waking hours, but their leisure life. His scene is laid in cheap brothels, alleys, shanties on the beaches, and in those hidden shrines on the mountainsides where the priests and priestesses of Ogun or Oxala exact their rites...Novels aren't any worse for having no 'social message'; but it's strange to find one which handles so much social material without taking it somewhere, only moving it from place to place."John Wain, New York Review of Books, 5/4/1967
language: English
title: Shepherds of the Night
titlecomplete: Shepherds of the Night
genres: Fiction, Brazil, Magical Realism, Latin American, Literature, Classics, Historical Fiction, Portuguese Literature
ratings_count: 370
awards: awardedAt: 410256000000
name: Premio Grinzane Cavour
category: Narrativa Straniera
publisher: Avon Books