Ummi (“Ummi. Una historia de la migración palestina”) is an Arabic word which translates as “my mama”. Baboun has chosen to follow her Ummi as she reconstructs her family’s memory, moving freely between memory, chronicle and biography. Her recollections go back to Palestine, her ancestors’ decision to escape, and the struggle to build a new life in distant South America. Baboun lets her own Palestinian, Greek, and Chilean roots transform her novelistic style, using this research as a starting point to navigate the discovery of family secrets and stories. The book is also the story of the author trying to find her own cultural identity in Chile, the country with the largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East. Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, Isabel Baboun has written with masterclass a book that is as moving as it is unique.

In her novel The Thai Woman (“La tailandesa”), Baboun presents us with Diana, a woman in her forties, at the verge of a turning point of her life. She feels trapped in both her private and professional life, not really connected to nobody and not even to herself and her body. She feels betrayed by Maxi, the man with whom she is living in the same apartment, and by Nancy, her supposed best friend, who snatched a role offer from under her nose and is now the TV starlet she could have been, instead of remaining a teacher at the high school where she has already studied herself. Thai boxing gives her a kick, a glimpse of self-empowerment. But only acting on stage enables her – herself and Moisés, Nancy’s little son with whom Diana “rehearses” a borrowed motherhood – to take a break from reality and to really feel free, to follow only herself without any outer rules, and to be who she really is.
Like Mieko Kawakami, Baboun creates protagonists representing the contemporary woman, delving into different aspects of femininity and maternity, in an always entertaining, witty style and a highly original language. The Thai Woman is a feminist novel of archaic force.

The novel Kid (“Cría”) focuses on the relationship between the narrator Zina and her parents, whose influence she believes she has escaped from in recent years. Zina lives in a small town in southern Chile with Joan, an older American woman, while she pretends to her parents that she is based in California. Her father has repeatedly beaten his wife and daughter and bullied them, and her mother, otherwise self-confident and fun-loving, has never managed to free herself from this situation. When she asks Zina to come home urgently because her father has to undergo heart surgery and could die, Joan encourages Zina to go along with the request, but not to regard it as a return home as her mother would like, but merely as a temporary visit. Zina agrees, but feels an anxiety settle on her chest, a shadow that reminds her of the gloom of her parents’ home. When Zina arrives in Santiago, she is caught up in the margins of the social unrest that shakes Chile in autumn 2019, in particular its capital city after the brutal deployment of security forces on 18 October. These events reflect her father’s violence, from which there also seems to be little escape. Her parents’ influence is revealed to be fully intact when her father’s heart surgery leads to complications that require a partial lung transplant. Ever the good daughter, Zina follows her mother’s pleas to help her father, and her spirit of resistance only stirs when she is being prepared for her own operation and the anaesthesia begins to take effect…

First published in 2000, Sinful Capão (“Capão Pecado”) marked an era and became one of the most talked about works of marginal literature.

In Sinful Capão, lives are worth very little, almost nothing. Everything is always hanging by a thread. As Ferréz writes, “the future is further ahead, much further ahead”. So far ahead that it’s often too late.
Rael is a teenager who wants to get away from the atrocious environment of violence in which he grew up. A dedicated son, he endeavours to get a good job. But his destiny is about to change when he falls in love with Paula, his friend’s girlfriend.

This book, which has already won over legions of readers in Brazil and around the world with its brutal and relentless story, is now in its sixth revised edition, with an afterword by Marcelino Freire. By narrating the dark underbelly of an utterly unequal society, where machismo and cruelty dictate the rules, this novel reveals its overwhelming force and its power to provoke new reflections.

Practical Handbook of Hatred (“Manual prático do ódio”) was called “a punch in the stomach” by the critics. It tells the story of Régis, Lúcio Fé and other favela dwellers, who can’t wait to pull off the big heist that will finally make them rich. They don’t care about harming those they live alongside, creating a world full of hatred and violence. In this drastic yet captivating novel, Ferréz shows the darkest and dirtiest sides of life in the favela.

Ferréz’ novel God Went Out For Lunch (“Deus foi almoçar”) is about the apparently calm life of the middle-aged public official Calixto. When he is left by his wife and his daughter, it could be a turning point for him. Although unable to adapt to his new situation, he cannot decide to take a new step either and stays trapped in a life that from the bottom of his heart he is longing to change. With this realistic and well-observed novel, Ferréz takes a close look at the Brazilian middle class for the first time.

The most important writer from the so-called marginal literature of Brazil, Ferréz, from São Paulo, makes his debut in the infantile-juvenile genre with Emerald Dawn (“Amanhecer Esmeralda”). In a beautifully illustrated edition, the author tells how the daily life of Emerald, a black girl and resident of a poor community, is being altered by gestures of love that improve her self-esteem. According to Ferréz, the character was inspired by a child who attended his lectures and impressed him with a haughtiness comparable to the great African nobles.

Youth – and in particular adolescence – is an explosive, exuberant time. But being a kid during a dictatorship, like the one in Argentina in the 1970s, is a different game. It demands not only courage, but also a dose of mischief. The narrator of Valecuatro is in secondary school when the dictatorship errupts; however, nothing changes. Everything still seems normal. Until he perceives the terror that overwhelms the papier-mâché scenario set up by the authorities. And he discovers that, in addition to the challenges that beset every adolescent boy – his place in society, sex, love, a reality so unfair that it revolts – his situation entails other dangers. For the body, yes, but above all for the soul.

The title that gives the novel its name is an allusion to the most popular card game in Argentina: truco. When the “vale cuatro” is called, the bet reaches its limit. It doesn’t matter if at that moment you have an unbeatable play or just a couple of useless cards. What counts is the conviction with which the bluff is held, the firmness in the look, the decision to go all in even when you have little or nothing.

With humour and sensitivity, Marcelo Figueras’s new novel asks what happens when the world becomes frightening and, instead of ‘feigning insanity’, everyone feigns normality. In that emergency, even if bad cards are dealt, there is no choice but to find a way to win the game.

All Demons Are Here (“Todos los demonios están aquí”) is a fascinating story that combines narrative talent with some real events in recent Argentinian history. Tomás Pons is a histrionic psychiatrist, popular among his colleagues at the Alvear Hospital. Recently separated from the mother of his only child, with more outgoings than income and little prospect of improvement, he receives an offer he can’t refuse: a senior position at a private clinic he has never heard of, located on a remote island in the Tigre delta. The clinic is an old, well-kept mansion surrounded by lush vegetation. Patients wander through the garden and there seems to be a harmony, an unearthly tranquillity. Little by little, Pons begins to notice strange movements and witnesses extreme situations that are resolved with unusual violence. He also discovers inscriptions from Dante’s Divine Comedy on the walls. Questions are piling up: Who really owns the hospital? Why do they withhold information about the patients? What is the role of the beautiful Sophía, who seems to know all the institution’s secrets? With a devilish plot, the new novel by Marcelo Figueras is a fascinating literary adventure that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

In The Black Heart of Crime (“El negro corazón del crimen”), Figueras devotes himself to the Argentinean cult author of Irish descent Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977), a true icon of Latin American literature. He reconstructs those months of investigation during which Walsh’s most emblematic book, Operation Massacre (“Operación Masacre”), was born. But he also narrates the transformation of that young man into the Rodolfo Walsh we know today: the writer committed to his time, with politics understood as the defence of the weak and oppressed, and journalism that tells what not everyone wants to hear and to know.

Buenos Aires, 1956. A heinous crime pushes a fiction writer to become a detective. That decision puts an end to the life he had lived until then: it turns him into a fugitive, drives him into the arms of a forbidden romance, questions everything he believes in and puts him face-to-face with death.

The boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred, as in Figueras’s novel. Because that terrible crime existed. And the writer-detective, too. In 1956 he was twenty-nine years old and began to call himself Rodolfo J. Walsh.

Operation Massacre is recognized as one of the foundational pieces of investigative journalism, a work of non-fiction literature, written 9 years before In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Marcelo Figueras’s novel The King of Thorns (“El rey de los espinos”) is a fast-paced adventure novel that crosses the limits of the fantasy and science fiction genres. In 2019, a famous Argentine comic writer is killed by the Secret State Police. To the young gravedigger Milo’s amazement, at the funeral he recognizes four of the author’s characters, each apparently arising from another world and time. Together with Milo and his best friend Baba, the four try to find the author’s last unpublished manuscript, where all of them are supposed to meet for the first time. Did the author bring them all together in order to be resurrected? And what role is played by the author’s daughters, who fought against the dictatorial regime and disappeared without a trace? With strong and unique characters like these, Figueras develops an enthralling story that has more in common with our real world than we might think at first glance.

In Kamchatka, Marcelo Figueras tells the moving story of ten-year-old Harry whose parents are politically persecuted in the heat of 1980s Argentina. They take him to a house in the country, pretending to play a game and bravely trying to face a life deprived of everything they have known so far. In an attempt to escape a world gone mad, Harry seeks consolation in his imagination. In the end, though, all their precautions cannot save his parents… With simple but beautiful language and subliminal humour, Figueras draws the reader into the adolescent’s world.

The Warm-up Battle (“La batalla del calentamiento“) is a fairy tale-like story full of humour and spooky suspense. Pat and her daughter Miranda have been moving around until they meet Teo, who immediately falls in love with the beautiful Pat. But the three are by no means ordinary people: Miranda has magical powers, and Teo is a giant. And what exactly has Pat been running from? Did Miranda’s father really die as she claims?

“As silent as a fish,” they say of people who cannot or will not talk for whatever reason. And the protagonists of Marcelo Figuera’s latest work move through the novel like fish in an Aquarium: constrained in the prison of their own speechlessness. One of them is Ulises Rosso, who sets out for Israel to look for his children, which his wife has taken away from him. He feels like a monster who destroys all relationships, yet he is powerless to change his situation. Arrived in a country where he is taken for a Palestinian because of his skin colour and treated accordingly, Ulises meets the artist Irit Rosenblum  and falls in love. Her soul too has been caught up in a cocoon since she lost her husband in an Intifada attack. The two of them have no language in common, and yet they understand one another.

Parallel to this story we follow Miriam and David, a couple who spent years trying for a child, only to lose their baby after a premature birth. She withdraws into a world of fish, which swim around like her “fish child” in its amniotic fluid. The couple are drawn to the local aquarium over and over again – a habit that David keeps up even after his wife’s death, as a way to feel close to her.

And finally, the child Danny plays a role. Irit takes him in after he is found on the street. He plays dumb, rejects any physical contact and his only communication is through drawings, usually of fish. That gives Irit the idea of taking Danny to the aquarium – where they meet David. Like in a play driven along in acts by the individual characters, like in a waltz in three tempos, Figueras has written a novel as dramatic as it is accomplished. He sketches out his character’s inability, regardless of their sex, age or cultural origin, to express themselves in words, yet without refusing communication and loving understanding in itself.

A wonderful book, dramatic, moving, scarred by pain and loss, complex and intense, yet beyond the unhappy end it has a much more important message: that of hope!

Gus is considered the most troublesome cricket at school. The fact that his mother is the local mayor doesn’t make things any easier. Gus is also tormented by the fact that he doesn’t know his father, who left when he was very young. Fortunately, Gus has the generous affection of his grandfather, who also feeds his imagination with tales of crickets that have travelled far away; tales that feed his grandson’s desire for adventure and his need to know what has become of his father. The situation is complicated when the prosperous merchant Peake becomes ambitious for the post of mayor and decides to attack the mayoress at her weak point: her son. To defend Amanda, with whom he has fallen in love, Gus gets into a fight with Rolf, a fellow thug and Peake’s relative who is accidentally injured. Peake manages to put the mayor in the dilemma of having to accept the request to expel Gus from school. Then a curious character arrives in town, a giant cricket who travels the world on a motorbike, and Gus decides to go with him to save his mother from the trouble he has caused her. The two separate without having broken the isolation that makes them suffer.

„I am eighteen years old and I look out at the Rio de la Plata. On Sunday afternoons, the nuns take us out for a walk. It‘s me, but from this side of time I see myself as if I were someone else.“ Lucía is a teenager who arrives in Buenos Aires to attend university. Her place to live: a nuns‘boarding school; her place to study: one of the most politicised faculties of the time. The tumultuous political reality of the late 60s and early 70s is the setting for her initiation into adult life and establishes a dislocated counterpoint, at times hilarious, with her daily life with the headmistress and her close companions. Before It Disappears (»Antes que desaparezca«) is built on a subtly complex yet diaphanous plot, which reaffirms Sylvia Iparraguirre‘s talent as a novelist and gives us this unforgettable novel with an autobiographical touch.

Russian authors burst into the 19th century with distinctive force and uniqueness within European literature, projecting their fundamental influence into the 20th century. Divided between the omnipotent power of the tsar – isolated in his fear of revolt – and the peasant people – subject to rural slavery – society had a single interpreter and a single spokesman: its writers. And only one representation: the one they gave it in their texts. With folkloric roots in Asia and an eye to the French Enlightenment, Russia produced all its modern literature in one century. Imagined and developed under fierce Tsarist censorship, its authors produced a narrative and poetry marked by an intense understanding of the human. After an introduction that situates us in the milestones of Russian history, Sylvia Iparraguirre analyses in Russian Literature Classes (“Clases de literatura rusa”) works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, who were of critical importance for universal culture and for all subsequent writers, who at some point have acknowledged that they are their literary debtors.

A reader discovers, during childhood, that she can live another life in books. More intense, passionate, unknown to others. She reads hypnotically Cortázar, Tolstoy, Bakhtin, Borges. Before and after, two large libraries sustain her: that of her grandmother in Los Toldos and the one she shared with Abelardo Castillo, whose portrait becomes a loving memory. From a reading diary, an album of poetry and her personal memory, the critical thinking of Sylvia Iparraguirre is revealed in The Invisible Life (“La vida invisible”) through an avid and genuine narrative.

In a small town in the Argentine pampas, quiet Sonia grows up in an orphanage. Only when the anarchist trade unionist Bautista, who spent many years in prison as an innocent man, woos the young woman does she awake from her long years of paralysis and turn to face life. Told in retrospective, the novel’s intensive characters and atmospheric descriptions of the broad landscapes of the Argentine pampas truly draw the reader in. After El muchacho de los senos de goma, The Orphaning (“La orfandad”) is the second part of a trilogy in progress portraying three generations of an Argentinean family.

The Boy with the Rubber Breasts (“El muchacho de los senos de goma”) is set in present-day Buenos Aires. Cristobal, or Cris, is seventeen years old and rather annoyed by his family home. His mother always takes his stepfather’s side, and he is always expected to help out in the workshop. He would rather be listening to music and indulging his passionate interest in philosophy. His teacher is Professor Mentasti, who invites him to attend advanced courses due to his incisive and independent reasoning. One day he packs his bags and leaves home. In a distant corner of Buenos Aires he finds refuge by chance at the home of Señora Vidot, a strange woman who seems to live in her own world. Cris does not know that her husband was lost at sea. She gives him a room without posing too many questions or asking anything in return. They both feel drawn to one another, and one night sexual tension becomes lovemaking. It is only later that Cris discovers that he has confused his new feelings with love, has new experiences and becomes more mature. He gives up his job as a seller of merchandise on the street – the rubber breasts, meant for relaxing office workers, were a real flop! – and, after a final talk to his Profesor who himself is passing through a crisis, decides to leave Buenos Aires.

With a sure hand and shimmering storytelling Sylvia Iparraguirre leads her readers through a compartmentalised city, in which flights of intellectual brilliance and bitter poverty, hope and hopelessness stand side by side, and where people survive crises and occasionally grow from them. The final scene, a description of the waking city and a young man making his escape, reads like the crescendo to a piece of music that gets deep under your skin.

After two volumes of short stories La Tierra del Fuego, her second novel, was shortlisted for the 1998 Premio Alfaguara. At the Buenos Aires Book Fair 1999 the work was awarded the prestigious Literary CriticsPrize as Best Book of the Year (1998), and the Sigfrido Radaelli Prize by the Club de los 13 for the best novel in 1998 and in Mexico the Sor Juana Prize.

In 1830 the “Beagle” sets sail from England for Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, captained by the young Robert FitzRoy. On arrival, the crew encounter members of the Yámana people. When the ship returns to London a Yámana girl, Fuegia, and three young men, one of them called Jemmy Button are on board. In London the Indios are introduced to British society and the royal family and later initiated into “civilised life” at a school in the country. Having spent two years in England, the Yámanas are returned to Tierra del Fuego by Captain FitzRoy. On board the ship this time was a young natural scientist, Charles Darwin, fully convinced of his science. Captain FitzRoy on the other hand sees it as his task to teach the Indios his language and culture and thus help them to achieve a better, more “civilised” life. He believes that once back in Tierra del Fuego the Yámanas will maintain their British way of life and pass it on to others. One year later, when Captain FitzRoy sails by Tierra del Fuego, he realises to his horror that Jemmy and the others have reverted to their old way of life and are living just like those around them; they want nothing more to do with England.

Tierra del Fuego. A Biography of the End of the World (“Tierra del Fuego. Una biografía del fin del mundo”) was first published as a coffee-table book and will soon be available in a more handy edition. In her introduction, Iparraguirre says: After its extensive journey from the north, the Andes, South America’s imposing vertebral column, stretches down to the continent’s southern most tip, crosses Tierra del Fuego’s Isla Grande, slips under the Le Maire Strait and then emerges finally, like a blackened, burned dragon’s tail in the Isla de Los Estados. This mountain range, right at the end of the world, was, according to myth, a source of shamanic power for the people of Tierra del Fuego. Marked by American largesse, nature rules dramatically in this corner of the world, towering over mankind. Men and women who behold these landscapes are swept giddily back to the beginning of time, overwhelmed by how small they feel in their presence, as they surrender to the natural boundaries that surround them.

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«).

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 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.

A domestic worker confronts her rural origins against the backdrop of the 2013 political protests in Rio. As demonstrators rail against President Dilma Rousseff’s government, this aging woman—a cook—listens to the endless chatter of a professor who tries to account for her life’s hardships and the current shortcomings of Brazilian democracy. They embark on a journey into politics highlighted by her supposed connection to Brazil’s first dictator Floriano Peixoto, known as the Iron Marshal. The cook obsesses over her supposed relative and President Rousseff’s recent speeches. Walking the same streets Floriano had walked a century earlier she and the professor contemplate an eerie parallel between the beginnings of Brazilian democracy and its current challenges.

Blending fact and fiction, O marechal de costas (“The Iron Marshal”) depicts these challenges in a complex and engaging panorama of Brazilian politics over the past 120 years.

A few days before retiring, Jurandir travels to Recife to settle a labour issue and ends up committed to a psychiatric hospital. Reporting on his dreams while remembering his affair with a colleague and the tragic death of his son André, a different perspective on his past life starts to unfold. O sonâmbulo amador (“The Amateur Sleepwalker”) chronicles the adventures of a disenchanted, humble protagonist, revealing the wounds of his past as in a jigsaw. The novel won the Telecom Prize 2013.

His debut novel Nosso grão mais fino (“Our Finer Grain”) is a lyrical portrait of family decadence and love gone wrong in twentieth-century Brazil. Ana and Vicente recall the ending of their affair and how it started back on their families’ sugarcane plantation. Together, they try to make sense of Ana’s father’s suicide during a Zeppelin trip, which changed their lives: Ana married Vicente’s uncle and made Vicente her secret lover, thus leaving both men in limbo. But while Vicente prefers the uncanny presence of past possibilities, Ana holds on to real life. The innovative unfolding of the narrative and the dense atmosphere make this novel the new literary discovery from Brazil.

In The Mountain (“A Montanha”), a writer travels across the world, attending literary events while working on a book inspired by the experiences of cancer patients, recounted directly by those who entrusted him with their most intimate truths. Haunted by the memories of his father, who also succumbed to the disease, and unsettled by his own doubts, he is suddenly confronted with an extraordinary twist: he is kidnapped by a mysterious Swedish academic who shadows his every step, who spies every moment of his creative process and seems to know all his thoughts.
Rooted in authentic testimonies from an oncology hospital and shaped by a profound autobiographical dimension, this novel pushes beyond the boundaries of realism, gradually descending into the realm of surrealism. What begins as an intimate reflection on memory, illness, and creativity evolves into a daring allegory of human existence itself.
Ambitious in scope and inventive in form, this work ventures into unexplored territories of contemporary fiction, where reality and imagination blur, and where literature becomes both a testimony to suffering and a meditation on the meaning of life.

Peixoto’s new novel Sunday Lunch (“Almoço de Domingo”) is a tribute to the Portuguese entrepreneur Rui Nabeiro, founder of the Delta Cafés, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday on 28 March 2021.
With great poetic power, the author traces the life of a man who wanted to become “a rich man of a different kind” and who today is a symbol of entrepreneurial commitment. Coming from the simplest of backgrounds and growing up in the small town of Campo Maior in the Alto Alentejo near the Spanish border, he succeeds in developing the small family business into an internationally operating corporate empire without sacrificing his humanity. Peixoto accompanies his protagonist through the two days before and on his birthday itself and lets individual episodes of his career emerge in short flashbacks. But “Sunday Lunch” is far more than just a biographical novel.
Written with genuine empathy, the book is a reflection on old age and death, on the uniqueness of every human being, but above all it is a celebration of a successful life whose richness is expressed less in the material than in the spiritual.

In Lisbon in the late 1990s, two writers meet: the young José in his early 30s, in the midst of a life crisis, and the established José Saramago at the height of his career. Following his debut, the young José is now expected to write a second novel, but he can‘t make any progress and is addicted to alcohol and gambling. He has enormous debts and agrees to write a Saramago biography, even if he finds his books rather long and difficult. Saramago himself is interested in the author of his biography and is ready for interviews. From this relationship, a story is born that mixes reality and fiction. While the main plot is heading towards the announcement of Saramago being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on 8 October 1998, the young José, true to a statement by the Portuguese intellectual that all writing is autobiographical, is increasingly merging with his subject. Peixoto leads the reader into a cabinet of mirrors from which there is no escape.

Between Bangkok and Las Vegas, José Luís Peixoto returns to non-fiction with an astonishing, layered book of unforeseen relationships, moving from the most intimate account to the most remote and exuberant of descriptions. The Imperfect Path (“O Caminho Imperfeito”) is itself the long journey to a Thailand beyond the normal tourist haunts, exploring lesser known aspects of its culture, society, history and religion, among many others. The sinister discovery of several parcels containing parts of a human body at a post office in Bangkok cause, with unpredictable consequences, his wanderings to become an ordeal. Every episode of this eccentric investigation forms “The Imperfect Path” and, at the same time, constitutes a search for the meaning of travel, writing, and life itself.

In his new novel In Your Belly (“Em Teu Ventre”), José Luís Peixoto addresses one of the defining religious events of the 20th century: the appearance of the Virgin Mary before the eyes of three children in the Portuguese village of Fátima in 1917. After lengthy interviews, the Catholic Church recognized this miracle, turning Fátima into a place of worldwide pilgrimage. But what is behind the phenomenon? Peixoto is interested in people, and so he chooses the ten-year-old Lúcia as the protagonist of his novel. She is the youngest of five children and therefore especially dear to her mother Maria’s heart. Although piously educated, Lúcia is a very headstrong and dreamy girl. For her, the arrival of the Madonna means a sudden end of her childhood and separation from her birth mother. Situated between Christian mysticism and historical research, Em Teu Ventre is a piece of fictional biography of the figure of Sister Lúcia, now revered as a saint in Portugal. Without deciding between reason and superstition, the novel is an ode to both the freedom of faith and the love between mother and child.

The sleepy village of Galveias is home to both long-established families with their rivalries and feuds, like the brothers José and Justino who fell out over their inheritance and haven’t spoken for over fifty years, and newcomers like Isabella, the beautiful Brazilian who runs the bakery that, at night, also functions as a brothel. After the village is struck by some sort of mysterious meteor, the bread starts tasting of sulphur, relationships are reshaped and a series of events is set in motion: it stops raining for nine months; the two brothers are finally reconciled with each other and with their past; Isabella is mistaken for a cork thief and accidentally shot. Then finally a baby girl who doesn’t smell of sulphur is born, and the spell is broken. This beautifully written novel is brimming with astute observations and depictions of human behaviour, of life itself and how it is shaped and changed. The characters that inhabit the captivating microcosm of Galveias inevitably draw the reader in with their intertwining stories that come together as one.

Book (“Livro”) confirms José Luís Peixoto as one of the leading contemporary Portuguese novelists, and also as an author of increasing importance on the international literary scene. This book chooses as its backdrop the extraordinary saga of Portuguese emigration to France, told through a gallery of unforgettable characters and the luminous writing of José Luís Peixoto. From a village in Portugal to Paris, and from popular culture to the most erudite of literary references, are revealed to us the traces of a past that took thousands of Portuguese in search of better conditions and a future of dual nationality. Overwhelming and striking, Book exposes the magnitude of the dream and the rawness, ironic, tender or grotesque, of reality. Through stories of lives, meetings and farewells, the reader is led to a disconcerting ending beyond the frontiers of literature.

What is this permanent itch on the head of every writer in the world? No anti-lice shampoo can soothe it. This widespread affliction makes the headlines of every newspaper and intrigues readers of this and every other book in existence. It is only when the protagonists of children´s books undertake the journey to enter the heads and creative minds of the itching authors that they make a great discovery: there are no lice! The itch that the authors have been feeling are new ideas, stories and characters. The itch won´t be relieved by shampoos or shaving, but it can be treated by expressing the authors´ creativity!
All the Writers of the World Have Their Heads Full of Lice (“Todos os Escritores do Mundo Têm a Cabeça Cheia de Piolhos“) is a beautifully written and illustrated book that focusses on the joy of writing and reading. It sparks young readers´ interest in creativity and upholds imagination as a great gift and important element of human life.

The protagonist of José Luís Peixoto’s first children’s book is a child of the rain. With such a unique mother, so necessary to everyone, he has to learn to share with the world the thing that is most important to him: maternal love. With exceptional tenderness, poetry and disarming simplicity, The Mother That Rained (“A Mãe Que Chovia”) honours and exalts one of nature’s most powerful forces: the unconditional love of mothers.

Against a backdrop of rural Portuguese poverty, a handful of magical characters are living out their destiny: José, a shepherd, who is visited by a devil whispering violent words in his ear; Moises and Elias, Siamese twins joined at the tip of their little fingers; Gabriel, a wise man, who is over one hundred years old; and an unnamed character who sits writing alone in a windowless room.
The characters in Blank Gaze / The Implacable Order of Things (“Nenhum Olhar”) are universal, and they are all at the mercy of fate – their lives are pulled in different directions and sometimes even suffocated and snuffed out… A dark and compelling story with elements of magic realism and Greek tragedy.

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.”