In The Large Carnivores (“Os Grandes Carnívoros”), Adriana Lisboa guides the reader through the restless thoughts and memories of Adelaide, an ex-convict and activist who finds herself confronted with the brutality of human relationships. Adelaide was a member of a group of animal rights activists and ended up getting involved in an extreme protest action, setting fire to a research laboratory in the United States. After three years in prison, she returns to Brazil. Looking for a fresh start, she moves to a small town in the mountains near Rio, where she meets Rai – the kind owner of the furnished house she rents – and his family. Alternating between Adelaide’s journey and the uncertainties of the new bonds that she forms, Adriana Lisboa weaves a subtle and powerful narrative about the fragility and violence that lurk in the most sensitive relationships, and points to the often arbitrary way in which certain aggressions are condemned and others normalised – including, here, human conduct towards other animal species.

All the Time that Exists (“Todo o Tempo que Existe”) is an autobiographical essay, Adriana Lisboa’s first foray into this genre. Starting with the loss of her father in 2021 and going back to the loss of her mother seven years earlier, the author reflects more widely on topics such as memory, oblivion, transience, and also the relationship between the “I” and the “other”, all set against the backdrop of the Botanical Gardens of Rio de Janeiro with a special look at the kingdom of plants. Her relationship with writing and art are also featured, as well as conversations with authors she values. As the writer Rosa Montero describes the work: “To reach a true understanding with life, it is necessary to reach an agreement with death: with one’s own death and that of the loved ones. That’s what Adriana Lisboa does in this beautiful and moving book, exploring the cut with which we all have to measure ourselves.”

All Saints in Rio de Janeiro, a hot Sunday afternoon. Mauro, a nine year-old boy, suffers a shock in a swimming pool and dies before anyone can help him. As they grow up, his sister Vanessa and his schoolmate André begin a relationship that soon surpasses friendship. They start a life together, but a shadow follows them: a secret kept by André’s sister, Isabel, who is also in love with Vanessa. Decades after the accident, in an act of desperate revenge, she reveals that it was André who pushed Mauro into the pool.
Alone now, working as biologist in New Zealand, Vanessa is an outsider wherever she goes. Revisiting her memories from an almost mythical Rio, she knows she is eternally linked to André. But can she remake her love story with him? Written in poetic and precise language, All Saints (“Todos os Santos”) is a brilliant novel about regret and loss, and about forgiveness.

When David discovers that he has terminal brain cancer, he decides to put his affairs in order. Then he meets Alex, a young mother who had an affair with a married man, and his fast-dwindling life gets a new sense of purpose. As the two of them slowly get closer, they learn that they are both descendants of immigrants: Alex’s grandmother and mother come from Vietnam, David’s parents are from Mexico and Brazil. While David, not wanting to die in Chicago, makes plans for his last journey to Hanói, the place where Alex’s mother was born, Alex in turn still hopes for a miracle. In her characteristic poetic style, Adriana Lisboa insightfully takes up the topic of the finiteness of life and how people deal with it, creating a moving story with very real characters.

In her novel Crow-Blue (“Azul-Corvo”), Adriana Lisboa tells an unusual road-story about growing-up and the search for one’s roots, simultaneously allowing for an intriguing glimpse at the life of the Brazilian guerillas. When her mother dies, thirteen-year-old Vanja moves to her stepfather in the US, an ex-guerilla from Brazil where he gained a reputation for being a relentless fighter. There she goes looking for her biological father, following her mother’s footsteps and finding out who she really is. The novel has been longlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2015.

Symphony in White (“Sinfonia em Branco”), the internationally-acclaimed novel by prize-winning Brazilian author Adriana Lisboa, follows the journeys – literal, chronological, and metaphysical – of two sisters raised in the apparently tranquil backlands of Brazil in the sixties and educated in teeming Rio de Janeiro in the seventies. Sisters who share dark secrets that affect every step of their way as they finally face their past so that they might at last embrace their future. It is the moving story that covers four decades of a family where ugly truths are kept hidden, secret, unspoken, paralleling the years of the Brazilian dictatorship when everyone knew that atrocities were being committed, but no one dared speak of them. As the complex but seemingly simple narrative shifts back and forth in space and time, each new revelation imparts added dimensions and more depth to the characters as well as to the narrative, which little by little builds up to unveil astonishing revelations and a shattering climax. But Symphony in white is much more than compelling storytelling or a novel of Brazilian manners and culture. Lisboa also makes numerous references to music and art throughout the novel, which in itself is not unlike a symphony where each character’s storyline represents a different instrument of a symphonic score, resulting in a dramatic and powerful work of great beauty and harmony. Add to that the pure pleasure of Lisboa’s eloquent metaphors, her lyrical, poetic prose, and her unexpected word choices, which allow the reader to examine the dark abysses of the human soul within a framework as delicate as the flight of a butterfly. Like all great literature, Symphony in White is a book of universal appeal that transcends all geographic borders.

In Rakushisha Adriana Lisboa invites us to discover, alongside her characters, the simplicity and beauty of the poetry of Matsuo Basho, a pioneer of the Haikai style: the art of saying the most possible with the minimum of words. Rakushisha is a journey to Japan seen through the eyes of two Brazilians: Haruki and Celina.

Starting from a fleeting encounter in a metro station in Rio de Janeiro, where both live, they end up taking their furthest ever trip from home: they travel together to Japan. Due to the isolation caused by the cultural diffence, this adventure ultimately becomes an interior journey, a journey to the untouched feelings and secrets of each one. Through the alternate narration of Haruki and Celina emerge Basho’s haikais, and thus the reader discovers Basho’s translator in Brazil is Haruki’s great unrequited love, and that Celina’s sad eyes conceal a great tragedy in her life. Rakushisha is a delicate novel, to be grasped with both hands, as the Japonese hold their objects.

In Colombine’s Kiss (“Um Beijo de Colombina”) Teresa, a talented writer from Rio de Janeiro, has rented a house near the beach, where she spends her days writing or sleeping, and at the end of the afternoon she goes out to swim in the sea. One day, Teresa does not return, and her body is not found. Back in the house, her boyfriend was waiting for her, finding a poem by the great Brazilian poet, Manuel Bandeira: ‘In the waves of the beach, in the waves of the sea, I want to be happy, I want to drown’. Colombine’s Kiss is narrated by him, and, as if to put his feelings in order, he dives into the universe she left behind, thus getting to know better the woman he lived with and coming to understand his feelings for her. ‘Love is a million small things’ is a line that appears in this novel and sums it up perfectly. The narration is light of touch and sensitive, patient and free of anguish. The final chapter of the book has a surprise in store for the reader, shedding a new light on all that has gone before, enclosing one fiction within another.

On the seashore, a mermaid and a butterfly catcher fall in love. So goes the story The Mermaid and the Butterfly Catcher (“A Sereia e o Ccaçador de Borboletas“) about this one magic meeting, because the butterfly catcher, who in fact was never hunting butterflies but just observing and admiring them, does not know how to swim or fly, and the mermaid cannot leave the water. The destiny of some Portuguese sailors, who have been on a voyage for three hundred years, depends on a repeat meeting between the mermaid and the butterfly catcher. Fortunately, they do meet up again, because a butterfly has taught the butterfly catcher to fly, so enabling he and the mermaid to meet once more, at which point the sailors consider their sea voyage to be over.

A moving and poetic novel about the fragility of people’s destiny, The Heart Sometimes Stops Beating (“O Coração às Vezes Para de Bater”) is the unburdening of a 15-year-old boy who writes letters to a hospitalized friend. Coming from different social backgrounds, the two are cariocas of Rio de Janeiro and share a passion for skateboarding. In short, fast and precise flashes, the protagonist makes an inventory of the joys and sorrows of a teenager today, including difficulties with his family, social relations, and the discovery of love in a city like Rio de Janeiro.