La Santita (“The Saint”) is an opening of cosmopoetic worlds in which the frontiers between body and spirit, culture and nature, feminine and masculine, playful and rational, science and magic fade away. In seven stories, the author organises universes in which mangroves, chickens, volcanic rocks, ashes, Obi-Wan Kenobi or Cristal meet and weave links that bring into play the existence of other realities (not necessarily Western) that escape the limits of time and space and the living and the dead. Inspired by the cosmologies of the Andean world and its deep violences, Moscoso makes magic with words, invents rhythms and brings references from popular culture together with another ancestral pop culture.
A puzzle of references so recognisable in Moscoso’s imaginary and in so many places in America. Posters of Chayanne and Hello Kitty among precarious dwellings, random vegetation, empty lots, houses made of unpainted and unplastered bricks, endless cities and buildings that shine in the sun, the smell of fried food and coriander. Neon and cumbia. Virgins and Star Wars. We are, perhaps, facing a literature of the end of the world.

Vladimir is a dystopian novel set in contemporary Buenos Aires, in the midst of the chaos produced by a sudden power failure. The title and the attraction of an unevenly aged couple is inspired by Nabokov’s novel “Lolita”, but with reversed gender roles.
The protagonist, Guinea Haze, 45, is a literature professor with an obsession for young boys. After a falling-out with a student that ends in a major scandal, she leaves university in the United States and returns to her home country. This happens at the time of the Great Blackout, when a large part of the world is disconnected. Buenos Aires airport is in chaos, Guinea hitchhikes and is picked up by Rostov Peret. As her mobile phone doesn’t work and Guinea can’t even check the address of her destination, Rostov offers her a place to stay. He lives with his son Vladimir, a 13-year-old teenager. Guinea and the young boy are attracted to each other as soon as they meet.
Rostov also begins to like Guinea, but there is no room for this attraction. The three of them try to organise their lives under very precarious circumstances. There isn’t even enough food for the two dogs in the house. Disaster is compounded by outcasts attacking the house, looting and killing in the streets, and the dogs go from defending them to starving to death. In an attempt to rescue Rostov from an attack by his own animals, Vladimir shoots randomly and kills his father. Guinea is now left as the boy’s lawful guardian. At first she comforts him, looks after him, cares for him. But finally her instinct takes over and she has a sexual experience with him.
Vladimir equates the destruction of the world with the destruction of the human being. The story of a woman who cannot escape her impulses and who will never end up renouncing them. In a world of freedoms where nothing in relation to sex is forbidden, the story of Guinea and Vladimir shows us how limits can always go further, while at the same time raising a new question: does society exist if there are no limits?

Leticia Martin‘s A New Noise (“Un ruido nuevo”) tells the story of modern family life, infidelity and the breakdown of marriage, with a metaphysical twist. Maria Lobo is the mother of three children, a wife, an advertising professional and a writer. She lives a comfortable middle-class life with her family in Buenos Aires. Her daily routine of transporting her children and going to work has recently been expanded to include visits to a creative writing guru and a psychoanalyst. Maria struggles to balance her authorial ambitions and her bad conscience about neglecting her children and her husband, Román. Her attempts to revive some passion with him fail. Then a romantic encounter with a colleague brings the problems to the surface in an explosive way, and her life begins to change rapidly. New Noise is a powerful and witty meditation on the tribulations of modern life from the perspective of a woman and her different roles. The metafictional element, combined with the fragmentary nature of the novel that reflects the protagonist‘s state of mind, is what makes the novel more than just a domestic drama. There is a wise irony in the way that the very conscious Maria tells her story, enriched by an excellent sense of comic timing, evident from the very first pages.

Martín struggles at home with his partner Cecilia: she is stubborn and self-centred. He diverts her with sex, and she uses the opportunity to make him pregnant. Estrógenos („Oestrogens“) plays in the future, in which the women refuse to give birth and men can get pregnant. Although Martín, at Cecilia’s insistence, has been undergoing hormone therapy for weeks, he feels surprised, but lets it happen. After the act, while his girlfriend gives a little cheer and then, as usual, takes a shower and goes to work, Martín buys a pregnancy test: Positive. He finds himself keeping silent at his workplace, for fear of degradation. It does not take long before a colleague, who has watched his protective hand movement over his belly, starts a rumour. After a short time his boss dismisses Martín on the pretext of a team restructuring. While he is still thinking about how to give the news to Cecilia, she tells him that she still feels much too young for family planning, and, by the way, has she met someone. She grabs her backpack and Martín remains alone, pregnant and unemployed. He looks for consolation in alcohol, and has an affair. While he is carrying on in a car park with his new flame, Greta, he is arrested. The government has decreed that every pregnant man must go to the nearest hospital without delay. Martín lives there like in a prison, while on the streets violent protests start. After his son is born, he finds a possibility to escape.The novel is brilliantly written and invariably captivates the reader. It can be read as a dystopia, but is astonishingly up-to-date in its sharp observations concerning the coexistence of men and women, technological development, and social order. What is the difference between the sexes today? Is everything desirable in terms of progress? What should be regulated by the state, and what reserved for privacy? Martín paints a gloomy picture without giving up hope. In the end, the father tells his son what happened, the circle of human life and tradition enters a new phase.

In his new book Gastronaut in Mexico. How resistance is fuelled (“Gastronauta en México. Cómo se alimenta la resistencia”), the award-winning journalist and author takes us on a culinary journey of discovery through several states of his adopted home, Mexico.

Through a traditional churipo recipe from Nahuatzen, Michoacán, we learn about the desperate efforts of the indigenous people to gain a degree of autonomy in their country, where organised crime does not even stop at the water-intensive cultivation and export of avocados. In Morelos, we sweat it out with the author in a temazcal before eating pork ribs, a traditional pre-Hispanic steam bath and shamanic ritual in a dome-shaped lodge, representing the womb of Mother Earth. In Comala, Colima, we visit a confectioner who still masters the art of Ante Colima, a baroque-style giant sweet that takes several days to prepare. The cultivation of amapola in Hueyáhuatl, Guerrero, is also a tradition, although the good times for farmers have long since given way to the production of fentanyl. Dessert is served by a lawyer who prefers to make and sell his own ice cream so that he has time for what he really loves in life.

The passionate chef and adventure traveller Mastrogiovanni makes full use of the power of travel and narrative journalism, experiencing cuisine as a lens through which to understand culture, socio-political reality, and life itself. A life in which nothing is as constant as perpetual change and in which tasting and partaking is as important as in the ancient gesture of sharing bread. Gastronaut is a plea to celebrate life with dedication and love and to enjoy it with all our senses.

 What can be done when everyone knows that a country’s institutions are made up of ruthless, corrupt, dishonest, and unscrupulous people?
What can be done when that same society is made up of citizens who not only allow but also carry out, participate in, support, keep silent, hide, and cover up one hundred twelve thousand disappearances?

With what strength do we keep moving forward? And also, how and why, despite everything, do we continue to fight?

This Is Where the Homeland Ends (“Aquí acaba la patria”) aims to capture the human experience of the border. The author delves deeply into the condition of the emigrant as an existential state, he talks about identity, he talks about who we are together with where we are and when we are. Mastrogiovanni manages to combine honesty and solidity with introspection, reflection and content, opening doors to the world, telling us stories of people and places, of other cultures and finally a lot about ourselves. Thus, we learn of the plague in Venice in 1348, of the legends of Tijuana, of Seneca‘s exile in Corsica, of the Comanche empire and of coffee cultivation, in a story that unfolds harmoniously with great irony. In this book, at the end of the last page, it becomes clear that the most important thing is the variety of characters who appear in it, and above all the reader himself. And it becomes clear that while the author did indeed tell a lot about himself, he has also taught the reader how to ride a bicycle, and it is up to the reader to decide whether he wants to ride on his own or not.

With The Assassin We Will Not Be. Melancholic Biography of a Gang Member (“El asesino que no seremos. Biografía melancólica de un pandillero“), the journalist Federico Mastrogiovanni has written a biographical chronicle of the life of Edwin, about his past in a gang, his experiences in numerous US correctional institutions, and his return to life outside. Edwin spent most of his life in the United States, where his single mother had found work. She could not dedicate much time to her children, and in their neighbourhood it was common for young people to form street gangs. The gang was like a family, the only thing that was safe. Violence and even murder was the order of the day. Then one day Edwin stabbed someone. During his years of imprisonment, Edwin, with an iron will, takes the time to educate himself and to train. Having served his sentence, and against all odds, he is able to build a second life from nothing, far away from his family: He works as an English teacher in a good neighbourhood in Mexico City, in a country that is new to him, and which he must get used to, now that he has been deported for life and has no possibility of returning to the United States.

The Assassin We Will Not Be reflects on the discrimination against Mexicans in the United States, addresses the inhumane violence of the prison system, especially solitary confinement and the deportation of undocumented Mexican offenders.

Neither Dead Nor Alive (“Ni vivos ni muertos“) is an important and extremely well-written book that examines through rigorous investigative journalism the tragic phenomenon of forced disappearance in Mexico, uncovering it as a rational and methodological construction designed to generate terror and annihilate dissident social movements and protests. Following the events of 26 September 2014 in Guerrero, where state forces were involved in the disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, Mastrogiovanni’s work develops a new line of enquiry around this pressing issue.

Through interviews with families of victims, experts in violence and drug trafficking, historians, political scientists, activists, journalists, public servants and victims themselves, the author offers a series of explanations for this phenomenon, to which, with over 30,000 disappeared persons, a significant part of the population has been subjected. Mastrogiovanni’s research offers the tools to think further about the subject: are we facing a deceitful strategy based solely on economic goals? What can the forced displacement of entire populations actually entail?

What happens to the dreams we had as children? Where do the children we were end up? Where do all the pirates, the astronauts, the doctors, the footballers, the ballerinas that populated our childhood dreams go? Is there a place where dreams come to life? At night, while everyone sleeps, luminescence appears. Each of us has our own, and this creature of light does what we dreamed of being as children. They go out while we sleep and go to the office, they set sail in their galleons, they explore ancient tombs. Sometimes they do normal things, sometimes absurd. Yuri meets Catalina in the land of luminescence and the girl takes him on a journey that will lead him to discover an unknown and wonderful world, the world of the Luminescence (»Luminiscencias«).

In her debut novel Daughter of Flowers (“A filha das flores”), Vanessa da Mata demonstrates her skill with language and her capability for creating a highly atmospheric and mesmerizing story. Giza grows up in a small Brazilian village where she helps run a flower business of a rather special kind with her cousins Florinda and Margarida – they deliver not only flowers but also love messages. At 18, Giza falls in love with Tito, but Florinda puts a stop to their blooming passion. As Giza grows up, the village seems to grow smaller, and looking for new territory, she discovers the Vila, an outer part that is taboo to most citizens. Yet Giza is welcomed with open arms and soon makes new friends, who introduce her to the Vila’s secret: the goddess Yade, a beautiful woman who choses a man to be with once a month. Meanwhile, strange things start happening around Giza: At night, she hears weird noises that her cousins appear to know nothing about, and the juice they give her makes her sleep too deeply. As Giza takes up her relationship with Tito again, she discovers a secret that links her family to Yade: the “goddess” is her maternal grandmother. Many years ago, something terrible happened in the village, after which Yade and her people were sent into the exile of the Vila…

In one line, Spinning Days of Night can be summarised thus: Young woman goes deaf overnight.

Luminous, shattering, and playful, Spinning Days of Night plunges the reader into the maelstrom of a limit experience as the main character is suddenly struck by a mysterious illness which traps her in a silent film.
Lily Liliana, a young multimedia artist, suddenly experiences a variety of maladies which soon lead to total loss of hearing, a ground zero experience. Surrounded by zesty and supportive characters, especially her partner Yann, this abrupt change leads to a series of transformations and insights, which address the themes of chance, illness, sound, silence, loss, love, friendship, metamorphosis, the senses (including those in animalia), tinnitus, disability, environmental triggers to illness and climate breakdown. If there is tragicomedy, there is also indictment and lament about the ills which plague our society, as Lily Liliana, who’s often referred to as the future bionic woman, starts writing notes and dropping them in a cardboard box named ‘The Museum of Pain,’ which will provide the basis for the novel. An SF party to celebrate her successful cochlear implant, a murder, new characters, events and adventures are all part of her new sonic world as she sets out to rebuild her life transformed by mourning, technology, bionics, comics, the internet and the plight of the planet.

Though not strictly autobiographical, Spinning Days of Night draws on Susana Medina´s own experience, who was struck with sudden hearing loss onset, due to an extremely rare autoimmune condition.

In her debut novel Philosophical Toys, Susana Medina achieves a rare feat: with a unique voice, she combines enjoyable philosophical deliberations with an appealing story.

Nina loses her mother when she is only six years old and grows up with her father in Almería. Wanting to become an artist, she goes to London, the arts metropolis. When her father starts to suffer from Alzheimer’s and moves into a nursing home, Nina clears out the attic in order to sell the house – and makes a surprising discovery: 95 pairs of her mother’s shoes, each one carefully packed away in its shoe box. Who was this woman? Was she really the dazzling actress Nina believed her to be? What feelings did her early death provoke in her father? And what is the meaning of all these shoes? Nina engages herself in the topic of fetishism, gaining astounding insight. In her relationship with her father, his illness and the experience of loss, she questions the independent existence of objects and the meaning they have for our lives.

Medina’s thoughts meander, alter, deviate, and come back again to their point of origin. With her clever, laid-back, witty perspective, she takes the reader on an entertaining stroll where there is much to discover.

One night in a provincial town the corpse of a young woman is found which is completely disfigured. The investigation on the murder of the young woman, who can later be identified, is, however, not the main theme of this unusual and disturbing novel. Her name is Eduarda. Around her four male figures revolve, all with a different relationship to her. So gradually an image of her forms, which is puzzle-like: the father, unable to show her his love, her lover, from whom she had a child and who finally murders her, her colleague at work who is secretly in love with her, and the forensic medical specialist who carries out the autopsy on the corpse. In the course of his work, which he masters to perfection, this man enters into a dialogue with death and tries to draw the last hidden secrets from the corpse. His actions have something religious about them.

An autopsy is like a birth. It cannot be repeated. What remains is the memory of Eduarda, a memory which, more so than life, is the opposite of death. This is My Body (“Este é o meu corpo”) exerts a strange fascination on the reader, and has been justifiably lauded by the critics.

‘Adultery’ means voluntary sexual relations between a married person and someone other than their spouse – and it is the main cause of divorce worldwide (in Portugal there are 89 marriages and 82 divorces per day). However, the history of adultery also includes great myths and stories enshrined in literature, religion, cinema, music and painting. From the Bible (Abraham betrays Sarah with Hagar) to Shakespeare’s plays, from medieval songs to Madame Bovary or The Maias, from the Roman Empire to the political intrigues of contemporary America, from the stories of our kings and queens to the scandals of Hollywood and pop culture, from Ulysses to Cousin Basílio, from the betrayals of the Greek gods to the lives of our neighbours – adultery is a decisive element in the sentimental history of humanity.

Sentimental Dictionary of Adultery (“Dicionário Sentimental do Adultério”) deals with betrayal and passion, temptation or sexual alchemy, the pleasure of risk and desire without order or law – but also with love. And with its fragile nature. This dictionary does not ‘moralise’ or ‘defend adultery’ – it is an erudite and entertaining guide to the history of adultery or passions and their scandals and transgressions.

The Last Seafarers (“Os últimos marinheiros”) portrays the world of the Portuguese people whose main source of livelihood is still seafaring. For most, their connection to the merchant navy is a family legacy, dating back two generations or even further. In the harsh solitude of cod fishing trawlers or in the relative comfort of more or less recent models of fishing or cargo ships, respect for the sea perpetuates its rules. Despite all the machinery, the profession of seafarer retains something intrepid and adventurous.

Portugal has 2,830 kilometres of coastline and is the third largest European Exclusive Economic Zone and the 11th largest in the world. Even so, there is not a single radio weather report that indicates the state of the sea. On board a commercial cargo ship and a trawler, Filipa Melo went to meet our last seafarers. Men and women who face the sea every day and do justice to our most mythical past, against all winds and tides.

In her new novel Less Than One (“Menos que Um”), Patrícia Melo talks about the daily battles for survival of a group of characters – street vendors, parking attendants, unemployed people, drunks, thieves, and scavengers; people who all share the fact that, by force of circumstances, they have to live on the streets.
“We are people”, shouts Chilves, a young black man, semi-literate, who grew up in a garbage dump and walks twenty kilometres every day, collecting paper, glass and cans to survive. His dream, as a Humble Professor of Truth, is to promote the Revolution. Jessica, fourteen, a crack user in search of her mother, doesn’t quite understand Chilves’ political message but she likes him, and to Chilves she is a goddess. The girl becomes pregnant, so the young couple’s main goal becomes finding a home for their soon-to-be-born child, but also for their street companions. Among them is Glenda, with sharp claws and jaguar tights, who wants to be happy as Glenda, and not as Weverton, her baptismal name. There is Zélia, a madwoman who lives in the cemetery of Piedade, dreaming of piercing the eyes of her son’s murderer. This son, the reader will learn, is Jessica’s brother. The reader will also learn that on the street, such an inhospitable place, friendships exist just like anywhere else, and synergies work. With everyone’s collaboration, fighting against real estate speculators, this homeless community manages to occupy an abandoned building and create a solidarity project.
This novel by Patrícia Melo, in which literature and poetry intertwine the destinies of the forgotten and abandoned of the big city, tries to answer the most human question of all: What is there when what there is is less than one? The answer that emerges from Less Than One is one only: Beneath the dirt, the vice, the hunger, the cold, the invisibility, the violence, the fear, and the loneliness, these men, women and children are people who also dream, or have once dreamed. Patrícia Melo’s fiction mercilessly shows the inequality and social violence of contemporary Brazilian society, but allows a way out for its protagonists, who get a place to live together and continue dreaming.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman  (“Mulheres Empilhadas”) discusses in harsh and humorous language the urgent issue of violence against women in Brazil. The book tells the story of a young lawyer from São Paulo who, eager to escape an abusive relationship, agrees to go to Acre, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest to cover a series of trials. While following the numerous cases of women murdered by their husbands, boyfriends or relatives, the young lawyer discovers the beauty of the forest and the dazzling and tragic reality of indigenous life. At the same time, while taking part in rituals involving ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink used for mystical purposes, she rediscovers the memory of her own personal tragedy: having witnessed, at the age of four, her father kill her mother.
Patrícia Melo creates a mosaic of a Brazil that endorses the killing of women and the mass imprisonment of black people, while turning a blind eye to the crimes of the white upper and middle classes.

In the Bible, Gog Magog stands for the enemy of the chosen people, in the revelations of St John, even for the Antichrist. In Patrícia Melo’s novel the name stands for the monster in each one of us. The narrator of this domestic drama with apocalyptic dimensions is an ordinary citizen, fifty-four years old, a biology teacher at an evening school, and living with his wife Marta in São Paulo. His profession bores him, his marriage has become routine. Only the new neighbour Ygor stirs his blood: because he makes so much noise, he hates him with all his heart and even wishes him dead.

One day, by chance, he gets the keys to Ygor’s apartment. He enjoys the feeling of power and scrambles around until his neighbour, whom he calls Mister Upsilon, returns unexpectedly. Mister Upsilon falls and, in the fighting that ensues, dies. The narrator now has a problem: To hide the business about the key, he has to make the corpse disappear. But this is not so easy. He dismembers it and drives out with the luggage compartment of his car full of body parts, but where there was previously open country there are now family homes, and finally he returns to his apartment with the plastic bags. For a few days he sits there with the bags until the police come and pick him up. Here his life takes an unexpected turn: prison is like a cure for him, he finds new meaning in life by learning to do useful things like building water cocks. When the court finds him guilty, the public takes interest, and along with the Sunday visits of his ex-wife, a new female admirer starts visiting him.

With her frenetic rhythm, her acidic language, ironic and full of humour, Patrícia Melo penetrates the mind of a man who is stunned by the world around him and incapable of living with the noise of contemporary life, and builds a plot around the effects that noise and silence are capable of producing on human behaviour.

In her long-awaited new novel, Ghost Light (“Fogo-Fátuo”), Patrícia Melo tells a gripping crime story. Azucena Gobbi, one of the few upright detectives in São Paulo, is going through a bad patch: Getting home one day, she catches her husband sleeping with her sister. At the same time she is investigating the murder of the dashing telenovela star Fábbio Cássio. The main suspect, his beautiful girlfriend Cayanne, does not seem very affected by his death, as she is too busy struggling to become a celebrity herself. While Azucena tries to get her private life under control, her investigations unexpectedly lead her to a paedophile ring – a place of no return, it seems… Ostensibly entertaining, this artfully constructed novel once again shows Patrícia Melo’s skill at dismantling Brazilian society and uncovering not only the killer, but also the lies some lives are built on.

The Body Snatcher (“Ladrão de Cadáveres”) is set in the Pantanal, the vast untamed Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday, alone on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses a fatal crash of a small plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the pilot’s backpack. When the crash is located several days later but the pilot’s body is missing, a macabre and dangerous scheme is hatched… Ladrão de cadáveres is a mesmerising mix of conspiracy, sex, betrayal of the living and desecration of the dead.

In Writing in the Dark (“Escrevendo no Escuro”), Patrícia Melo brings to her first collection of short stories the same critical eye for detail and the same psychological insight that characterise her novels. These are stories that intrigue, disquiet, and sometimes puzzle, displaying a universality that addresses many of the anxieties and demons that besiege men and women in the twenty-first century.

His first novel Baía dos Tigres (“Bay of Tigers”) could also be described as a large-scale report and as travel literature in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin. This is an astonishing book about the author’s journey from Angola (Luanda) to Mozambique taking three and a half months. Mendes’ world presents itself to the reader like an old-fashioned junk shop, only that the journey is arduous and not quite as romantic. It takes the reader through a crisis-ridden and war-torn country. The journey resembles a trip to the heart of darkness, to the end of humanity, as one critic put it. And herein lies the true significance of Baía dos Tigres. Pedro Rosa Mendes has succeeded in writing an unusual text, which is very subtly composed, a text which, on the basis of countless individual fates, unfurls the everyday panorama of southern Africa, while at the same time painting a vigorous portrait of man.

In September 2000 Pedro Rosa Mendes was awarded the Prize for the Best Novel by the Portuguese PEN Club and the Literature Prize of Cascais.

In Peregrinação de Enmanuel Jhesus (“The Pilgrimage of Enmanuel Jhesus”), Pedro Rosa Mendes lends his voice to East Timor, its complex history and varied landscape, its colourful people and richly influenced culture. Interwoven with the protagonist Alor’s story – an architect travelling the island – historical events, political remembrances, theological debates, descriptions of martial arts and many other gems from this unique island’s treasure trove enrich the narrative and leave the reader fascinated with what he has learned in the process. True to his style and in beautiful language, Pedro Rosa Mendes renders the horrors East Timor has had to suffer in skilfully composed fragments.

In her award-winning Moqueca de maridos (“Barbecued Husbands”), Betty Mindlin has collected previously only orally transmitted erotic myths of five indigenous tribes of the Brazilian Amazon. At times erotic, at times romantic, the myths also reveal a violent repression of women and sexual liberty, showing that the indigenous world is not always the paradise we might imagine it to be. Written in uncensored language, Moqueca de Maridos is both an outstanding testimony and highly atmospheric literature.

Betty Mindlin’s Diários da Floresta (“Forest Diary”) is a passionate report of her experiences among the Suruí. Little by little, the author lets herself get caught up in habits and customs that are new to her, losing her view ‘from without’. Fusing personal diary and anthropological notebook, Diários da Floresta escapes any attempt at classification, surprising the reader in an engrossing and original manner.