“Three hundred thousand women who were deceived by all the doctors involved. Three hundred thousand women who now take to the streets, exposing their scars and demanding justice from the doctors who perpetrated the crime.”
In Our Women (“Nuestras mujeres“) Ana, an obstetrician gynaecologist and surgeon, who participated in the forced sterilisation campaigns, seeks to escape unharmed from her persecutors as she guiltily recalls the medical negligence in which she was complicit in the 1990s. Fearful, more than 15 years later, she tries to survive as a criminal against humanity by running an illegal abortion clinic with her ex-boss and lover, evading the media, the government, and her whistleblowers.

Can a mother be her daughter’s worst enemy? In [Her] (“[Ella]”), the mother is a prison where any love, affection, tenderness, or understanding has been exhausted. Instead, it has turned into a place of deep loneliness. A death impulse runs through the ruined house, which mirrors the state of the characters themselves. The situation of the daughter – who is the narrator of the novel– worsened decades ago when her father and twin brother left home. She resigned herself to being nothing more than the projection of her mother’s obsessions and desires. The mother kept her away from the world, building a hierarchical relationship of authority and submission. The daughter never had the opportunity to create a life of her own, and when the mother finally dies at ninety-four, it may be too late for her daughter to get a second chance. In this intense novel, which draws on both the psychological thriller and the Latin American family saga tradition, it is not clear that death implies liberation.

Sofia is facing the death penalty for murdering her sister. Tied to a wooden chair, she is tortured and forced to describe her crime in detail. The police, her persecutor, her psychiatrist, and her lawyer pay close attention to her confession. Sofía narrates the story of a tenaciously wounded family, haunted by ghosts and perversions. But she focuses on the terrifying tension between these two sisters who stand at opposite poles: if one represents beauty, the other embodies deformity; if one exercises power, the other is submission. While trying to explain the murder, this thriller exposes how sibling rivalry is as fierce as the unhealthy obsession with beauty. Sofia develops her own voice, which reveals her loneliness but also her cowardice.

Thorndike´s This Death Does Exist (“Esa muerte existe”) is an addictive novel that crosses the boundaries between insanity and abandonment, bringing the reader closer to a particular kind of sadness that occurs only when death surrounds us.

In The End of the United States of America. An Epic (“O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América. Epopeia”), in the middle of an American football game, a terrible plague enters the United States of America. In the midst of this is Bloom, the hero of the epic, who, like Oedipus, will meet a terrible fate but will try to save America from falling apart. Bloom gets into his car to travel across the United States in search of a solution, but also looking for his love, the Mexican La Rosa.

The two political leaders, Ted Trash, right-wing extremist and Left Wing, communist and left-wing extremist, instead of pacifying the country, fight for its separation. At a certain point, it becomes clear that the Plague only affects the poor. In some states, they are placed in ghettos. Different states adopt opposing laws. There is a division between Marxist-extremists and fascists. Tensions escalate until they lead to the Second Civil War. The country is divided in two, Homo Pobrus and Homo Ricus, genetically separated, becoming two distinct species incapable of reproducing with each other. The poor die at an average age of forty-two, while the rich live to one hundred and thirty. Bloom is rich, La Rosa is poor.

Bloom, who thought he was a natural-born American, was actually adopted by an American couple living in New York. When he receives an oracle saying that he will save America but also kill his father and mother, Bloom decides to distance himself from the parents he believes to be his real ones. What happens is that, on his journey across America to try to find the plague, he accidentally kills his real father in a car accident and sleeps with his real mother, without knowing it, at a hippie camp. Bloom finally finds La Rosa, the woman he met at the beginning of the epic. The two stay together. And La Rosa becomes pregnant. This means that the two have once again made the genes of the poor and the rich compatible.

Ted Trash and Left Wing each lead their own army, dividing the country in two. But Bloom, without realising it, saves America not from the plague but from the genetic division. It is as if Bloom and La Rosa were the new Adam and Eve, recreating a single human species.

A prose sonorously thought out and designed to be read in a hushed voice, as Gonçalo M. Tavares defines it, this is the book Mussolini’s Boots (“As Botas de Mussolini”). It is the beginning of a Fragmented History of the World (“História Fragmentada do Mundo”), which starts by analysing news from the 21st century and the memory of historical characters and facts. Its pages include Robespierre, one of the exponents of the French Revolution; Turing, a genius of detail and numbers; the hand of Hitler as a young painter and the biography of his niece, Geli Raubal, with whom the dictator is said to have fallen in love; the great fire in Tokyo in 1923 and the voice of Emperor Hirohito of Japan when, over the radio, he decreed his country’s surrender; the tragedy of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the follies of the juggler Joseph L. Greenstein, who wandered around the world. Greenstein, who wandered the American fairs of the 20th century; the turbulent life of Malcolm X; Enrico Fermi’s atomic reactor, linked to the atomic bomb; the high-speed tragedy of Marilyn Monroe; and the imposing finger of Tito, president of Yugoslavia; the day the Berlin Wall was erected and Nietzsche’s sanatorium; the trial of a Nazi in 2020, already 93 years old; and the high boots of Mussolini, the Italian dictator. These are flashes, small fragments, notes.

Bashô tells a short story of his many journeys. He is leaving for the city of Maruoka and his great friend, Hokushi, who is from Kanazawa, thought he would only accompany him for a short distance – “but ended up travelling all the way to Maruoka, unable to say goodbye”. So we have a friend who endlessly says goodbye to the other, travelling all the way on a journey that is not his own. And then I imagine the continuation of this story. Now it would be Bashô’s friend Hokushi who would have to leave for his home, and Bashô would go with him, just a few metres, just to say goodbye, but he wouldn’t be able to let go of him and would go with him all the way back to Kanazawa. Imagine a farewell like this, uninterrupted, between two humans. Two humans who could spend a lifetime saying goodbye to each other like this, with such ceremony and delicacy.

This Dictionary of Artists (“Dicionário de Artistas”), this Museum, starts from a detail, a tiny fragment, or the very central core of an artist’s work, and from there the text moves somewhere else. In the way that an animal that is hungry leaves its nest to go to a place where it senses food, thus the text starts its journey. But there is nothing didactic or explanatory about it, the texts in this Dictionary are autonomous beings that go out into the streets free and completely alone after midnight.

The Middle Bone (“O Osso do Meio”) forms part of the universe of The Kingdom (“O Reino”), next in the series following Klaus Klump: A Man (“Um homem: Klaus Klump“), Joseph Walser’s Machine (“A Máquina de Joseph Walser”), Jerusalem, and Learning to Pray in the Age of Technology (“Aprender a rezar na Era da Técnica”). Perhaps a tone, books with tones (colours, aggression, speed) rather than literary genres. A tone such as this: how does evil, excitement, passivity and violence flow through the many soils of the earth? Taking place in a post-war period, in a movement of collective hangover. It is a book where the middle is there, right at the beginning, and there it remains until the end. Three men and a woman caught up in a point of their violent, (almost) happy lives. Happiness has many variations and some are not at all benign. Kahnnak, Albert Mulder, Maria Llurbai, Vassliss Rania: three men and a woman. A harsh and sad book.

Tavares has been writing a daily column for the renowned Portuguese newspaper Expresso tracking the COVID-19 pandemic, entitled Plague Diary (“Diário da Peste”). The first entry in Englishtranslation by Daniel Hahn went online at Words Without Borders. Several texts have been published at: Granta, Bookanista, PEN Transmissions, Asymptote, Politics/Letters, Onomatomania, The Massachusetts Reviews, Scroll, The White Review, and TLS. A chronological survey and access to the English translations can be found here: > danielhahn.co.uk. Plague Diary is also available in Argentina, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Greece, India, Italy, The Netherlands, Peru, and Venezuela.

First book rights have been sold in Greece, Spain and for Romanian language.

In America, Said Jonathan (“Na América, Disse Jonathan”) is a book that relates a trip through the United States of America. During this trip, the protagonist writes a diary that follows his real and imaginary adventures. It is a ­ ctional diary. The author brings a portrait of Kafka to the United States of America and puts it in various places throughout the country, including the supermarket shelves of 7-Eleven convenience stores. Kafka’s portrait seems to disturb a country the size of the United States of America. As if Kafka‘s face were asking uncomfortable questions of this great country.

Mythologies (“Mitologias”), is one of the most important literary universes of Gonçalo M. Tavares. This world – which is now beginning to be published – blends men, machines, animals, and objects in a 21st Century mythology that can be read in any order of entry. It is a return to the traditional Once Upon a Time format set in a mythical time, which mixes dates and exchanges narrative orders in a space without geographic location. There is a suspension of normal physical laws, a different logic, other narrative conventions, in a zone of freedom that deals with evil, human temptations and their disorders and fears. Five children go through this world and just want what everyone wants: to survive as they grow.

The Devil (“O Diabo”) is the story of the Devil who sits wellbehaved at the table but who is quickly led astray by children. Mythologies is a universe of fiction by Gonçalo M. Tavares, the result of a five-year creative process, a unique work of great literary richness and brilliance, using the narrative tradition of orality and fantasy, in which the author places humankind and history in a mythological dimension that he distorts, to show and explore more fully what is human nature. It is a return to ‘Once Upon a Time’ set in a mythical time, mixing dates and swapping narrative orders, in a space without geographical location.

In the middle of the forest, five children lost. Or four. Because the youngest of the sisters got lost from those who were already lost. The children find a man-with-the-evil-eye, but he‘s good. They also encounter Speed, which is a dangerous element that makes men mad. There is a Train that does not like humans and a man who cannot stop gawping at the world. There is a tiny church where a body can barely fit, but this body has room to pray. And there are those who come out cured of very small spaces. In Five Children, Five Rats (“Cinco Meninos, Cinco Ratos”) we are in a mythological narrative, and machines and animals have since long ceased to be mere helpers or friends. There are very hungry machines.

In The Woman-Without-a-Head and the Man-With-the-Evil-Eye (“A Mulher Sem-Cabeça e o Homem-do-Mau-Olhado”), Gonçalo M. Tavares repositions mankind and history within a mythological dimension, which he distorts in order to clarify, and through which, using the narrative universe of orality and fantasy, he brilliantly explores the essence of human nature. A woman’s head is beaten off, but she can still walk upright. A man with an evil eye cannot look at his bride. Five children of the king are devoured by a machine. A famous neurologist wants to give a poor madman a smile. And a group of downtrodden wretches builds a flying machine to flee before the revolution. If Kafka had rewritten Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, this book would have been the result.

The effort to distinguish various forms of knowledge production has been a constant occupation of Tavares; in particular distinguishing independent science from literature, the main theme of the last part of Encyclopaedia (“Encyclopédia”), entitled Short Notes on Literature-Bloom (“Breves Notas sobre a Literatura-Bloom”). Science, according to Tavares, is focussed on all that can be repeated; literature, on everything that is unrepeatable. Science was created to resolve paradoxes and contradictions; literature, on the contrary, requires “specialists in mystery”. But not mysteries for detectives, Tavares points out, not those mysteries that end with the discovery of the murderer: to study mystery means increasing, not decreasing it, so that at the end of Literature-Bloom the reader knows less facts than he did before. This paradoxical logic, this wild arithmetic, is one of the central issues of Tavares poetic and literary language: to domestication, it counters with estrangement; to the desire to control, the ethics of dispossession.

(Borja Bagunyà)

His Excellency, The Circumlucologist (“O Torcicologologista, Excelência”) is a work of fiction: ironic and capable of making one burst out in laughter, but also a painful book, composed of two very different parts. The first, wherein disenchantment intersects with corrosive humor, is composed of fictional dialogues between two characters, the Excellencies, created and developed over a few years by Gonçalo M. Tavares in the pages of a newspaper. Your Excellency speaks to Your Excellency, and–in the middle of the absurdity that is existence and the attempt to understand it–the two discourse on good and evil, revolutions, boredom, dance and laziness, big questions and minor mishaps, leaps forward and major downfalls. Continuous irony, humor, and sabotage of thought and language progress in the dialogue between these two curious Excellencies, characters of impeccable manners and a quick, comical wit.

The second part of O Torcicologologista, Excelência takes the reader to commotion of the city, to the small gestures and great tragedies that there reside. An accelerated tragedy in which an abrupt zoom into and quick glance at humanity brings a collective character to the foreground: the city, the modern city, with its illnesses, its obsessions, and, sometimes, its hopes.

A Girl is Lost in Her Century, Looking for Her Father (“Uma Menina Está Perdida no seu Século à Procura do Pai”) tells the story of Hanna, a 12-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome. Together with Marius, a man who seems to be hiding from something, she embarks on a journey through cities haunted by traces of World War II. Once more, Tavares takes his readers to a dismal world that poses existential questions.

The Greek myth of the tragedy Alceste, by the playwright Euripides, is revived in Old People Want to Live Too (“Os Velhos Também Querem Viver”). In this novel-poem, Gonçalo M. Tavares stages the drama in contemporary Sarajevo and discusses issues such as death, love, sacrifice, the value of thousands of lives, and the value of just one.

Atlas of the Body and the Imagination (“Atlas do corpo e da imaginação”) is a multilayered essay that revolves around literature and art, addressing topics like fiction, identity, technology and desire. With a firm hand and lucid spirit, Tavares guides us around the labyrinthine world we live in, revisiting the work of some of the most important contemporary thinkers, among them Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt and Nietzsche.

Please find here the trailer of the Portuguese edition: > Atlas do corpo e da imaginação Booktrailer

Gonçalo M. Tavares’ novel A Voyage to India (“Uma Viagem à Índia”) is a mental journey as well as a physical one. Written in easily accessible language, which stands in stark contrast to its epic form inspired by The Lusiads, A Voyage to India relates the experiences Bloom has on his way to India and back.

The Neighbourhood (“O Bairro”) describes a utopian neighbourhood whose characters share the names of great artists and writers, almost a literary version of Asterix’s village.

From an impressive list of works published in swift succession which surprise readers by their philosophical mind quizzes, diffidently and ironically told events and broad stylistic variations, choice is made here of a number in which the main protagonist is a “Senhor”: Mr Valéry and Logic (”O Senhor Valéry e a Lógica“) embraces 25 short, playfully-philosophical stories about Mr. Valéry, who is short but tries hard to adapt to his surroundings, more or less successfully. With apparent childlike naivety he upsets the rules of logic and reason. For example, he jumps up and down in order to be as tall as his fellow men, declaring: I am as tall as tall people, only for a shorter while.

Mr Henri and the Encyclopaedia (”O Senhor Henri e a Enciclopédia“), a close relative of Mr. Valéry’s, is a bit more egocentric and conceited and likes to dabble in paradoxical matters and linguistic games, besides being very partial to absinthe. Mister Henri says … it’s true that if a man mixes absinthe with reality it makes for a better reality … yet it’s also the case that if a man mixes absinthe with reality it makes for a worse reality …

Mr Swedenborg and the Geometrical Investigations (”O Senhor Swedenborg e as Investigações Geométricas“), the latest resident in the writer’s quarter, is based on a Swedish scientist, theologian and mystic who, in the eighteenth century, wrote a large amount of fiction in Latin. Tavares’ Swedenborg uses the lectures that his colleagues and the people living in his neighbourhood give, to help him think through and carry out his geometric research. His reflections on memory, the mirror, seduction, desire, death and dozens of other things, are acute observations on life, always from a geometric and logical perspective and written in the familiar and jocular tone of the Senhores.

And other gentlemen, neighbours in a fictional writers´quarter, are introduced in book form such as Mr. Brecht, Mr. Juarroz, Mr. Calvino, Mr. Walser, Mr. Kraus and Mr. Eliot.

In a series which the author calls The Kingdom (“O Reino”), Tavares has published four novels which – this time in a less playful manner – address the topic of the essence of human existence.

Just like Walser’s dark notebooks, Gonçalo M. Tavares’ Black Books continue to give their version of the world we live in, […] of individual conscience, and the fragility of a human being in the play of existential forces, and the indifference or alienation of the individual. Joseph Walser’s Machine (“A Máquina de Joseph Walser”), following Klaus Klump: A Man (“Um Homem: Klaus Klump”), is constructed as an attempt at apprehending the essence of humanity, drawing on material with the soul of a frighteningly rational world.

In Jerusalém Ernst Spengler finds himself alone in the night of the 29th of May. He is about to throw himself out of the window. Suddenly the phone rings. Change of scene: The thirty-year-old Mylia is in her apartment and suffering great pain. She is terminally ill. She leaves the flat to go to a church. Ever since the war ended, Hinnerek Obst can not go out into the street without fear. For his eerie guise he is taken to be a murderer. He too is roaming the streets this night. Theodor Busbeck, doctor, historian and ex-husband of Mylia likewise leaves his apartment at 3 am in the morning in search of a prostitute. Mylia had one day turned up at his surgery and said I am schizophrenically mad. Would you like to cure me? The two had married. Later, however, Theodor left his wife in a psychiatric clinic. For years he had worked on developing a mathematical formula to foresee future crimes in the history of mankind.

In a clear and objective language, this book tells a strange and disconcerting story. It seems as though a secret force is leading the individual characters to their encounter in this particular night. A world coined by violence, fear, pain and insanity is evoked. The author succeeds in combining an exceedingly attention-grabbing story full of surprising contemplations on human nature with the diverse mechanisms of the exertion of power.

Jerusalém has been selected for the Portuguese edition of “1001 books to read before dying – a chronological guide to the most important novels of all times”. The novel appears alongside works by Philip Roth and John Banville.

In his novel Matteo Lost His Job (“Matteo Perdeu o Emprego”), Tavares explores the course of his protagonist’s destiny. Matteo answers an advertisement for a job and the woman who interviews him has a peculiar characteristic: she has no arms. His duty will be to accompany her and do everything that she cannot do. He takes the job because it is the first offer he’s received in several months, but he doesn’t like it and leaves it. He spends a few more months unemployed until he responds to a new ad. The man he meets has no arms.

In The Shoes. Stories by Mister Valéry (“Os Sapatos. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”) Mr. Valéry walks in the street with a white shoe on his left foot and a black shoe on his right foot. Sometimes it’s the other way around. But he is never wrong. He gets irritated when people tell him that he has mixed up his shoes. He then switches his shoes, but receives the same reaction. He gets even more irritated. According to his logic, one of these two situations has to be right for the other to be wrong, since they are inverse. He decides he is indifferent to the subject, because if they say both situations are wrong, it is because they are both right. In this unusual work for children, Gonçalo M. Tavares explores the limits of logic and philosophical principles in a creative and entertaining way.

For Mr. Valéry, holidays are the times when no one can require you to make decisions. The difficult thing is to find the ideal house where he can rest. In an attempt to discover the best place, in The Holiday House. Stories by Mister Valéry (“A Casa de Férias. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”) Mr. Valéry imagines different houses, which by their specific but always unusual structure can offer him the rest he deserves. However, his imagination does not stop working and surprises us with ever more incredible propositions, revealing his extraordinary power.

In The Friends. Stories by Mister Valéry (“Os Amigos. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”), Mr. Valéry is small but jumps a lot, so he explains that he is “like tall people but only for a short time.” But “if tall people jumped, he would never reach them vertically” and, persistent in his learning, he abandons the exercise and begins new experiments: first a bench, then a bench with wheels, even thinking about how to “freeze a jump”. “When concentrating, Mr Valéry could actually see the tops of the heads of people who were much taller than him,” but with the vision from above “he had difficulty remembering the faces of the people he met. “With height, Mr. Valéry lost friends.”So finally he decides to be tall only in his head.

In The Two Sides. Stories by Mister Valéry (“Os Dois Lados. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”), Mr Valéry has a problem to solve: how to always be on the right side of the world? Mr Valéry’s dilemma calls for rules, and his steps in seeking this knowledge show us the absurdity of a mental system, touching us in our awareness of the absurdities that we all, at some point, raise.

Developing the theory that the world has two sides, “the right and the left,” Mr Valéry implements a disciplined and rigorous methodology: he divides his house into two parts and “only touches the things that were on his left with the left hand and the things on his right hand with his right hand”. Furthermore, in order never to deceive himself in rigorously always using the “right” hand, even when lying on his back, he painted “the whole left side of the house, including every object, in blue” and the other side in red. But so as to make no mistake, Mr. Valéry had another great trick: his left hand was also painted blue and his right hand red.

In his new novel Where Minotaurs Graze (“Onde Pastam os Minotauros”), Terron relocates the myth of the Minotaur, that horrific, carnivorous hybrid of human body and bull’s head, deep in the Brazilian countryside. Somewhere in Mato Grosso, a huge slaughterhouse with its associated soya fields dominates a town as its sole employer. But the factory produces for export to Arab countries and the local employees have been replaced by Palestinian Muslims. The laid-off workers stand with other starving people outside the fence, waiting for the customary handout of leftover bones on the last working day of the year. But inside the slaughterhouse, two friends, Crente (engl.: Believer) and Cão (engl.: Dog), one of whom has just lost his wife to the pandemic and with it his faith, while the other is perhaps himself a hybrid creature, for he can hear the cattle speak, are planning an uprising. When a commission arrives late in the afternoon to investigate the possibility of kosher slaughter, the revolt breaks out. Cão, who planned it, is killed in the process, sacrificing himself to feed the hungry and free the cattle, but Crente and Cão’s girlfriend Lucy Fuerza, who in the meantime have blown open the company safe, manage to escape from the general destruction with the looted money.
With his powerful, empathetic and controlled pictorial language, Terron unfolds this apocalyptic story that exposes globalised capitalism as well as man’s ruthless treatment of the nature entrusted to him. At the end, despite everything, he hints at the hope that the path out of the labyrinth may lead to a more just world.

This novel is a mixture of thriller and allegory centred on the revolt of a few oppressed people against the tyranny of capital and the disaster of civilisation.

In his new novel The Laughter of Rats (“O Riso dos Ratos”), Terron creates a dystopian picture of Brazil’s present or near future. His nameless protagonist, an intellectual who works as a freelance translator and editor, lives in an equally nameless city. He is the father of an adult daughter, a student of acting who was raped by a bar owner. Not trusting the system of justice, the father feels obliged to seek revenge himself. A request that his daughter rejects in horror, as she believes it will set in motion an endless chain of violence. The daughter flees, the father sinks into lethargy, incapable of any action, and does not leave the apartment for months. When he is finally forced to, he enters a devastated city where – perhaps as a result of a deadly virus – all social norms have been suspended. The return to his apartment building is barred and suddenly he joins the ranks of the homeless. He finds refuge in the former Futurama supermarket, where he used to do his shopping with his daughter. But this is only the first stop in a cruel descent that leads him to the underworld, to the plantations of a dubious “bishop” and even as a prisoner to a slave ship. Like Dante in his Commedia, he traverses purgatory and hell to eventually find death on an apparently paradisiacal island. What keeps him alive is the thought of revenge, but also the memory of moments of happiness with his daughter.
Terron tells this apocalyptic journey through hell in a powerful, often lyrical language that will remain fixed in readers’ memories.

There are only fifty Kaajapukugi Indians left in the world. It is an isolated and mysterious tribe that, with the destruction of the Amazon, finds itself facing extinction because it has lost its land and means of living. It is about to disappear forever. In a daring scheme, it is up to the enigmatic Boaventura, a mixture of indigenous rights activist and adventurer, to lead the last of the kaajapukugi, as political refugees, to a sanctuary in Mexico. The idea provokes controversy, and the world watches attentively the rescue preparations. But Boaventura suddenly dies, and the person given the responsibility for concluding the plan is another activist with little knowledge of the tribe. He goes on to find himself in the midst of a macabre conspiracy and a mystery whose tentacles expand into both the past and the future. It is he who tells the story.
In the novel Death and Meteor (“A Morte e o Meteoro”), Joca Reiners Terron creates an intricate and surprising literary adventure that combines the end of the Amazon with ancestral secrets, anarchist Indians and hallucinogenic insects.

The Tremendous Sadness of the Snow Leopard (“A Tristeza Extraordinária do Leopardo-das-Neves”) intertwines the gripping stories of three main characters to form an intriguing whole. A man in his fifties looks after his senile father, not knowing he has a sick sister. A shifty nurse is taking care of a strange child that is only awake at night while a taxi driver lets his attack dogs loose to hunt for human prey. Then an innocent night excursion to the zoo to see the lonely snow leopard turns into a nightmare. As the mysterious child’s secret is unveiled, the man shows his sister the sun after 66 years of darkness.

Combining beautiful language with a touch of irony and magic realism, Joca Reiners Terron’s latest novel is full of eerie suspense.

From the Bottom of the Well You Can See the Moon (“Do Fundo do Poço se Vê a Lua”) is a fast-paced crime novel about identity and brotherly love, written in a style at once entertaining and violent.

Wilson and William are twins born in São Paulo in the 1980s but their similarities are merely physical. After a tragic accident, Wilson loses his memory and starts a new life in Cairo. But the past keeps nagging at his subconscious, and as the pieces start falling into place, he lures his long-lost brother to Egypt to confront him with what he now knows really happened that night…

How do you write what has been forgotten? Is it possible to lend a voice to someone who can no longer tell their own story? How do you accept that the forms of a text are always provisional? In Before It Fades (“Antes que apague”), these difficult questions unfold into others no less unsettling. The persistent search for a narrative form culminates in a moment of affirmation, when that provisional shape suddenly reveals itself to be, in all its instability, both necessary and urgent.
The theme is delicate and delicately presented, as the person immersed in the silence of late-stage Alzheimer’s is the narrator’s mother. As she recounts episodes from this woman’s life—or from the life of the person she once was—the daughter struggles to renegotiate the meanings of that essential relationship. She does so through repeated forays into the past and back again, by speaking with distant relatives, sifting through documents, and allowing chance to play its part.
As she churns through memories—her own and those of others—the protagonist discovers an impactful event her mother never once mentioned. Uncovering the secret hidden in that archive so common to so many families—the trove of what may be more comfortable not to know—haunts and transforms both the text and the character, but does not prevent them from resisting: “I write to you, mom; against you. But also for you.”

While waiting for a flight, Natalia meets the palliative care physician who treated her father, Artur. The conversation reawakens in her the whole experience of loss, still fresh and full of scars. Artur was a doctor, so the news of the return of cancer is followed by the certainty of finality. Death becomes a family affair, and we follow with rare delicacy not only his physical decline, but its effects on the lives of his children, wife, and grandchildren. The narrator reconstructs this journey, which, although dramatic, is charged with the tenderness of memory. Small Chances (“As pequenas chances”) is a novel of extraordinary beauty, a sharp enquiry into family, remembrance, Judaism, life, and death.
Natalia Timerman follows the path of authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård and Annie Ernaux in creating a powerful portrait of grief and love.

Abandoned women. Literature has always been permeated with tragic stories of fascinating figures, such as Medea and Dido, who fall apart in the face of male abandonment. Now it’s the turn of Natalia Timerman and her Empty Glass (“Copo vazio”). The novel tells the story of Mirela, an intelligent and successful woman, who ends up submerged in disturbing affections when she falls in love with Pedro. First, she experiences what Clarice Lispector called ‘unbearable happiness’. From there, it’s only one step to doubt and discouragement.

This book was born out of Timerman’s work at the Penitentiary System Hospital Centre, where she worked in the psychiatric ward. The result is not a book about psychiatric care in a prison hospital. What the author does in Outcasts (“Desterros”) is a complex, engaging narrative with a literary dimension, about an experience of reality that is often impermeable, meaningless and harsh, and which requires imagination, empathy and listening in order to gain meaning and continuity, without letting the individuals fade away. In between the many stories of prisoners, wardens and doctors, the story of Donamingo runs throughout the book: an Angolan woman imprisoned for drug trafficking, she discovers she is pregnant while in prison. There is also Gessé, who, in order not to be taken out of hospital, enlarged his belly wound, leaving his innards exposed. In literary prose, the author tells the patients’ stories without omitting her surroundings and herself: ”I, too, became part of the absurd.”

Despite his obligations as a writer, he never abandoned his profession as a doctor and always felt closest to the simple people from the region where he was born. He encouraged resistance to dictatorship and fascism not just in theory; he even suffered imprisonment for his convictions. Only seldom did Torga interrupt his secluded life in the university city of Coimbra to make public appearances. He was awarded numerous national and international prizes for his multifaceted and comprehensive oeuvre. He published a total of 40 volumes: novels, short-stories, plays, poetry and diaries. Miguel Torga’s oeuvre exudes the scent of earth, reveals a dominant love for concrete things, and portrays the simple people of northern Portugal, whose mysteries and myth gain entry intothe author’s lyrical and narrative work. Torga’s deliberately archaic style possesses the vividness and originality of the language of the farmers of northern Portugal. In its conciseness, his prose mirrors the ruggedness of their rural homeland.

Represented for Dom Quixote, Portugal.

Earth (“Tierra”) is a book that recounts the intimacies of history. Through the everyday memories of people from more than 100 countries, Alberto Torres Blandina narrates the great events and recent changes in humanity from the beginning of the Cold War to the present day. The years follow one another slowly, in a drone’s-eye vision that encompasses every continent.
It begins in August 1961 with Gertrud fleeing to West Berlin after receiving a tip-off about the construction of the Berlin Wall, while in Masatepe, Nicaragua, two wealthy families at odds – the Sánchez and the Ramírez – quarrel over two young lovers. In India, Kim complains about the changes that have left everything as it was, while Ahmed, Charles de Gaulle’s bodyguard in Algeria, frees his son who has been arrested by the police after being mistaken for a rebel. Donvé is born in the midst of anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa; Augustus, an anti-communist, discovers just before attacking the Americans at the Bay of Pigs that the revolution, as Commander Fidel Castro has just said in his speech, is socialist. In Fram, a Japanese colony in Paraguay, a young man of the second generation does not know how to tell his parents that he wants to be a tango dancer.
The book continues relentlessly for six decades, returning again and again to the same families, weaving a web of small and big events, of intimate lives and clashing collectivities, of projects and memories, showing us that, despite our skin colour and the fact that we speak very different languages with countless accents, we are all very much alike.

With Jávea Torres Blandina presents a relentlessly honest, autobiographical novel. The town of Jávea, situated on the coast south of Valencia, becomes a cipher of social background: any local who thinks something of him or herself owns a holiday home or at least a flat there. The narrator‘s family had neither of these. They were on the losing side after the Civil War and could make a living only with difficulty. Alberto did not receive private tuition in English like his privileged classmates, and when he turned eighteen, he worked in a factory to finance his studies. That was in 1994, and now, in 2016, he is sitting with three old friends having a beer in the country house that, of course, belongs to one of them.
All of them tell stories, and perhaps he has the most and the most exciting stories to tell. And yet, to this day, something seems to separate him from his friends. In a series of intertwined, linked stories, Torres Blandina lets us take a look at his family history, and he circles around the question that sociologists are increasingly asking themselves today: how influential are the different material and immaterial conditions into which we are born on our participation in society and the position we can achieve in it? At a high literary level, Jávea invites us to an entertaining and highly thought-provoking reading on an important topic of our time.

In Against the Wolves (“Contra los lobos”), a man is trapped in his own house where he discovers a strange presence for which he has no explanation. He has no idea that his story is closely linked to two idealistic teenagers who sealed a violent pact and to a vagabond the police found in the mountains, with the fingertips burned and the whole body decorated/laced with religious signs. They are the sick. The rare. The different. The improper. They inhabit the margins and should adapt to fit. Obey and camouflage to go unnoticed. Because the fight is unequal. Because they cannot win. Not in a thousand years they could … Or could they?, Paul thinks, ready to transcend all borders and to change the rules that should be changed. And Paul has a plan: flee from a false, arbitrary and imposed order. Find the door that will lead him to that place where everything we thought we knew stops serving. Where trails are not followed: they are drawn.

Valencia, Spain: All the animals are heading north as if drawn by a magnet. Even Micaela’s limping dog is determined to leave her home. Nairobi, Kenya: A cleaning woman reports her own son to her employers after he stole from them. Can a mother wish harm on her own child? These and other places all over the world are the settings for Alberto Torres Blandina’s new novel With the Cold (“Con el frío”), connected by short reports from an old boat called Esperanza that, like the animals, is heading north. On board there are men, women and children of all nationalities and races. Some think they are on another Ark. Others see themselves as offerings without knowing who or what for, just like no scientist can explain the continuing winter and the strange migration that is taking place. With the Cold reflects on topics like knowledge, the truth and the complex fabric with which this hyper-communicated and yet at the same time autistic world is woven. The different voices flow together, intersecting or running parallel to each other to uncover a world that is in dire need of answers. Written with biting wit in concise language, these interconnected, original stories surprise the reader at every turn, casting their spell on the reader.

In Things that could never happen in Tokyo (“Cosas que nunca ocurrirían en Tokio”), the protagonist Salvador Fuensanta works in Madrid airport, on the verge of retirement. He sweeps the corridors and watches people come and go. There are hundreds of stories he tells, whenever he finds the time, to his friend Juana, an older kiosk attendant. Some of the stories are unbelievable. But as he says, the truth is often unbelievable… and often starts with a lie. Like that woman that mistook him from afar for an old lover and even after she had realised that it was not him, decided to continue with the mistaken identity in order to finalise an unfinished love story. Or like the story about the strange Club of the Impossible Desires that designs lives made to measure, and rewards every new member with a free partner. There is the one about the young man who invented a language that removed all the bad in the world or the scientist who came across the man he himself should have been according to mathematical logic. Salvador has heard all these stories and many more. “Listen Mrs Juana, listen to this”, he says, and both of them smile like two teenagers discovering what love is.

This novel was compared to Muriel Barbery’s bestseller “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”. The author’s German publishing house DVA sold 15,000 copies.

There is nothing easier, we learn in Kids splashing Cat with Gasoline (“Niños rociando gato con gasolina”), than convincing a father his son is special. That he will be amongst the responsibles for changing the world, and for bringing a new spiritual and peaceful era to earth. The Aquarius Age. And then tell him about a school for children like them, where they will learn to develop their abilities before the world destroys them.

Since the end of the seventies the hippie movement and later on the new age believed in the Age of Aquarius and with this the widespread theory that its first leaders were being born amongst us. This is the story of four children, and the adults they became, chosen to lead the future and educated by a man inspired by his belief in one beautiful idea.

In his new novel Folding Map of the Labyrinth (“Mapa desplegable del laberinto”), Alberto Torres Blandina tells the subtly interwoven stories of Elisa, Jaime and Alberto. Jaime has a photo store, and although he loves his wife and daughter, everything seems predictable to him. His hobby is collecting his customers’ sexiest nude photos. One of them is Alberto, who photographs women in explicit poses until suddenly there are only romantic pictures of one girl. When Jaime happens to come across her at a station one day, he pretends to recognise her, introducing himself as Pedro. Elisa goes along with his story, and the two of them invent a new present. Elisa was happy with Alberto until she became the victim of a rape. After that, Alberto saw himself as a monster, sex as impure, and he withdrew increasingly, before finally walking out without explaining himself to Elisa. Shortly after that, Elisa meets the mysterious Pedro and begins a new life with him, promising to one another never to let their relationship become routine – until their carefully built paradise begins to crumble.

In a clear, authentic language, the three protagonists each narrate their own lives. What starts out an entertaining and witty read soon becomes a deeply moving story about human identity and good and evil that will occupy the reader long after the last page.

A rainy night in a shabby Montevideo bar. Two men are sitting at a table, as the young man tells the old man a story. A tape recorder is running. It all starts with Tres buitres, three vultures in the sky. The young man, Javier Michel, is on his way to Bolivia, somewhere on a country road. He bought the car he is driving for next to nothing in Buenos Aires, as it’s stolen, and his plan is to smuggle it across the border and sell it on again. Javier needs money for a trip to Spain.

Arrived in Santa Cruz, Javier meets Paula. He is fascinated by this beautiful woman, and while the city threatens to drown in floods of rain they spend all night talking. When Paula has gone, Javier finds more money in his rucksack than they agreed on for the car, but his passport is missing.

He finds out about Paula’s brother Ivo, who looks rather like him. Ivo is in trouble, suspected of murdering the partner of the head of the car-smuggling gang. The boss is Milo, Ivo’s and Paula’s uncle. He has his own brother on his conscience, making orphans out of his niece and nephew many years ago. By chance, Javier and Paula meet again. She wants to be taken across the border illegally, and Javier agrees to take on the risk. Ivo is already in Argentina, and Javier soon realises that he is an unstable person incapable of committing murder, quite unlike the single-minded Paula. The brother and sister end up arguing bitterly, Ivo insulting Paula as Milos’ whore. As they fight, her bag falls to the ground, revealing a gun. In the very end, Javier finds Paula dead – in her bag the flower that he had given her in Santa Cruz. Paula, driven by revenge, was not just using him after all, as the old man with the tape recorder initially suspected.

With sleight of hand and terse language, Henry Trujillo tells a tragic and complex family tale, the extent of which is only revealed in the final showdown. The atmosphere is expertly depicted, marked out by the menacing mountains of the Argentinean-Bolivian border region. The novel draws great tension from the cleverly thought-out dosages of information and the convincing depiction of the protagonists and their relationships.