Somewhere upriver in the deep Amazon rainforest is the Vila Amazônia, a grand old estate-house with a busy jute plantation, property of the tycoon Trajano Mattoso. "Jano" is in poor health and desperate at his son's failure to prove himself a responsible heir. Instead, Mundo is turning out to be a rebel, a would-be artist, who prefers the company of the poor, and despises his father and his father's world.

But Mundo has other father-figures: Arana, a self-styled great artist and opportunist who acts as his mentor; and Ranulfo, a proud wastrel whom Mundo befriended in his early childhood. It's Ranulfo who agrees to help Mundo execute his great piece of protest art, The Field of Crosses, a provocation that will bring the family conflict to a head.

Set in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Brazil was buckling under a military regime, Ashes of the Amazon is the story of Mundo's rebellion against the destiny his father has prepared for him; against massive authority, unshakable class structures, the all-pervasive influences of the military. It is not a fight Mundo can win. Indeed, the violent antipathy only has losers – father and son, friends, servants, and the boy's devoted mother Alícia, an ambitious woman trapped in a tormented marriage.

Like Hatoum's The Brothers, Ashes of the Amazon is at once a particular story and a generic one. The questions it raises relate to specific social ills in a certain country, but its power comes from great tensions that transcend these: of generational conflict, of bitter disappointments, of the role of the artist, of reactionary versus revolutionary.

Milton Hatoum's early novels drew on his upbringing in the Brazilian melting-pot of Manaus, the rainforest river port legendary for its floating markets and extravagant opera house. Tale of a Certain Orient and The Brothers, explored the past of a city at the confluence of rivers and cultures that had lured workers and traders since the rubber boom of the 1880s - including Hatoum's Lebanese Arab forebears, who exchanged the Mediterranean for the Amazon. The Brothers, translated from the Portuguese in 2002, confirmed Hatoum as one of South America's leading contemporary novelists.

The entwined families of Ashes of the Amazon have no ties to the Levant, though their conflicts recall the archetypal rivalries of the earlier books. This novel alludes more directly to Hatoum's childhood years in its main setting of Manaus during Brazil's military dictatorship of 1964-85. Through a tale of two schoolfriends caught between vying adult mentors and tormentors, it evokes a bitterly fraught era of creativity and collusion, of rebellion, exile and defeat.