South America travel guide

Benedict Allen's Mad White Giant is a visceral account of a hellish trip to the Amazon, matched by Tobias Schneebaum's mind-blowing 1960s classic Keep the River on Your Right about eight years spent living with a Peruvian jungle tribe. Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire is a little-known classic, Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries a far better-known one.

But this storied continent is perhaps best understood – rather than merely described – by its fiction (and poetry), capturing its soul with insights quite different to non-fiction – wonderfully exemplified, for example, by the 'magic realism' woven through the stories of Argentina's celebrated Jorge Luis Borges.

Colombia's Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps the continent's most famous writer, thanks to novels like Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa is a more recent Nobel winner, best known for his novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter – as well as nearly being elected the country's president back in 1990.

Chile actually boasts South America's most literary Nobel winners thanks to poetic duo Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. The country's most famous writer, though, is probably ex-pat novelist Isabel Allende – her novels Of Love and Shadows and House of the Spirits have been made into major films, but we suggest My Invented Country as a pre-trip read.

Despite dominating the continent geographically, Brazil has had less impact on the global literary stage than some of its smaller neighbours – but that doesn't detract from the atmospheric quality of Bahian novelist Jorge Amado, whose fine novels include Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon. And of course one of Brazil's most famous names is Paulo Coelho, who has sold over 200 million books worldwide - although they reveal little about his native country.

For two of the quirkiest South American reflections, let's return to outsider writers. You don't have to be a cartoon-loving kid to adore Hergé's 1940s yarn Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun with its pre-Columbian civilisation and spitting llamas. Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos, meanwhile, is a blackly comic riff on human evolution centred on small group of people stranded on a remote island in the Galápagos and left to develop a million years into the future...