As silent and determined as small snails, carrying their homes, their hopes and lives on their backs, Brazilians created a country of immigrants/migrants, whose identity was always at least partly defined by the migration cycles: the 1700s gold rush, the 1800s coffee boom, the 1900s rubber boom. Mixing love stories and family recipes, fiction and reality, this novel tells the story of the latest of those cycles, the soybean, which triggered a modern, but no less heroic migration that led to the birth of factories and towns, transformed agriculture, invented millionaires and beggars.