Ilko Minev Knihy

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 Turkey Help comes from an improbable source: Albert Goring, the brother of Hermann Goring (a top Nazi party leader and designated successor of Adolf Hitler). Albert Goring is instrumental in helping Licco and other jews escape from a sure death. On this journey Licco meets another escapee, Berta - the woman of his life. By several twists of fate, the young couple ends up building a new life in an unknown land, the hot and humid Amazon. Meanwhile, Liccos brother is still in Bulgaria, which has been transformed into a Soviet satellite under the dictatorship of Stalin. The title of the book takes its inspiration from the worlds pacifist hymn "Where have all the flowers gone," first made famous by the sensual voice of Marlene Dietrich. A must read.

More than a century ago, British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, wrote "The Lost World", inspired by the mystery of the alluring Mount Roraima. Now in the XXI century, Ilko Minev, bestseller author in Brazil and Bulgaria, places his third novel in the mysterious Mount Roraima, a mountain surrounded by legends and unexplainable facts. Minev brings the reader an exciting adventure, in one of the most intricate places on the planet. Diamonds, wild horses, and the struggle between life and death...

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 families when tragedy strikes, leaving the green-eyed "cabocla" Maria alone and with three small children to care for. Fighting to survive in one of the most isolated, inhospitable corners of the world, she eventually lands in the rough prospecting "garimpos" of the Amazon, where she first works for Dona Sandra, madam of a brothel, and then for Oleg Hazan, a Bulgarian immigrant determined to strike it rich mining for river gold. Readers of Minev's first book, "As Flowers Go," will recognize the protagonists Licco, Oleg, and David, who transport us even deeper into the magical Amazon on this second journey.