Futebol

Alex Bellos

The Brazilian football team is one of the modern wonders of the world. At its best it exudes a skill, flamboyance and romantic pull like nothing else on earth. Football is how the world sees Brazil and how Brazilians see themselves.

Travelling extensively from the Uruguayan border to the north-eastern backlands, from the coastal cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to the Amazon jungle, Bellos shows how Brazil changed football and how football shaped Brazil. With an unerring eye for a good story and a marvellous ear for the voices of the people he meets, Alex Bellos describes the startling range of football spin-offs: from Autoball, football with cars and a giant leather ball to the alarming Footbull (yes — with bulls).

Alex Bellos is the Observer and Guardian’s reporter in Rio de Janeiro where he has lived and worked for four years.

The Brothers

Milton Hatoum

Set in the great Brazilian port of Manaus during the golden decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is the story of identical twins who battle for the love of their mother. In recounting the fortunes of this Lebanese immigrant family over many decades, The Brothers delivers a wealth of sensations to the reader: Manaus is full of smells (diesel fuel, oxen entrails, flowering jasmine), of sounds (the cries of vendors, the butchered sheep, the steady heartbeat of boat motors) and tastes (of tropical fruit, of Arab sweets, of blood).

The backdrop is a city built over the confluence of two great rivers in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, and the novel itself is full of eddies, dangerous undertows and shifting surface reflections. The Brothers is a hard-eyed portrait not just of a family but of a nation in which the Amazon has long remained a mute, vast appendage.

Milton Hatoum was born in Manaus and lives in São Paulo. The Brothers is his second novel.

Inferno

Patrícia Melo

For eleven-year-old Kingie, there are lessons to be learned from drug trafficking. His first job is as a lookout, working from a strategic spot on the hillside slums of Rio. But as he grows older he realises that in order to survive you must also keep a close watch on yourself.

In her powerful new novel, Patrícia Melo tells of Kingie's life of crime, of his poverty-ridden childhood, how he pursues his dreams and the way he learns to achieve leadership. In his uncertain world, chaos manifests itself as violence and deprivation, whether machine-gun fire, unwanted adolescent pregnancy, or the fraught relationships between servants and their employers. Kingie's path intersects with a network of stories of love, family, crime and power. The plot twists and turns through a compelling tale where rapid-fire language and a sharp sense of humour combine to make this shocking story of a man who would be king.

The Killer

Patrícia Melo

Translated by Clifford E. Landers

You may know someone like Maiquel: someone with a short fuse, a dubious habit or two perhaps, but basically decent. He’s just suggestible, prey to whim. See how Maiquel in a mad moment loses his temper and kills someone—and gets away with it. Then a toothache and a random visit to the dentist provide the opportunity for another murder, this time for profit. Follow Maiquel on his path of good intentions, indecision and then escalating violence. Observe his adoration yet misuse of women, his capitulation of goading friends in high places, his ironic rise in social esteem and his career success as he sinks into moral depravity. Patrícia Melo’s is an acid vision of urban violence, but more, it is the brilliant portrait of recognisable individual careening out of control.

Patrícia Melo is a young screenwriter and playwright as well as a novelist. She lives in Sao Paulo.

In Praise of Lies

Patrícia Melo

José Guber was in love with a deadly woman. Melissa could stuff a rabbit down a boa's throat without turning a hair. She was an expert on poisonous species and venom, which is just what José wanted to work into his latest crime thriller. Then Melissa became too interested in José's dastardly plots - especially the ones where diabolical women seduced and corrupted weak men.

‘In Praise of Lies takes us on a quick, cleverly self-conscious spin through the old Double Indemnity plot, then branches out into further dark absurdity’ Sunday Times

‘A stylish, enjoyable page-turner’ Scotland on Sunday

Lies We Live By

Eduardo Gianetti

In an adventurous quest to tell the truth about lies, Eduardo Gianetti exposes the role of self-deception in individual acts of daring. He unmasks the self-interest we hide from ourselves but are ready to spot in others, and explores the paradox which allows one part of the brain to lie to the other. Sceptical of the ethos of self-help books which tout 'self-knowledge', Gianetti's entertaining and provocative analysis opnes up a rich horizon for those who may seriously be deceiving themselves.

Eduardo Gianetti was born in Belo Horizonte in 1957. He has a BA in economics and social science from the University of São Paulo, and a PhD from Cambridge University. He teaches at the Faculty of Economics, Administration and Accountancy at the University of São Paulo.

The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’

Translated by Elizabeth Bishop

First published in an edition of 2,000 copies to amuse the author’s family and friends, The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’ soon gained a reputation in literary circles in Rio de Janeiro. Elizabeth Bishop says: ‘When I first came to Brazil, in 1952, my Brazilian friends frequently recommended this little book, Minha vida de menina, a diary kept by a girl between the ages of twelve and fifteen, in the far-off town of Diamantina in 1839-1895… The more I read the book the better I liked it. The scenes it described were odd, remote and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true. The longer I stayed the more Brazilian the book seemed, yet much of it could have happened in any provincial town.’

‘Helena Morley’ was the pseudonym of Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeir Brant, who later became well known and much loved in Rio society.

Elizabeth Bishop was one of the greatest, most beloved poets of the twentieth century. Born in the United States, she spent fifteen years in Brazil.

The Lost Manuscript

Rubem Fonseca

Translated by Clifford E. Landers

Rubem Fonseca is one of Brazil’s most popular and distinguished novelists and screenwriters. He has written many novels including Bufo & Spallanzani and High Art, which was made into the film Exposure. His work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian, among other languages. He lives in Rio de Janeiro.

A runaway bestseller when published in Brazil, The Lost Manuscript (Vastas Emocoes e Pensamentos Imperfeitos), like other novels by Rubem Fonseca, utilises the thriller framework to present searing insights into the human psyche. Filled with fascinating detail of the high camp world of carnival costume design, the intricate history of precious stones, the nature of dreams and the subtlety of film-making, it is absorbing at every level.

Benjamin

Chico Buarque

Translated by Clifford E. Landers

Fulfilling the promise of Turbulence, Chico Buarque’s second novel is again set in the author’s home city of Rio de Janeiro. As the novel opens, Benjamin Zambraia, a middle-aged model well past his peak, has just been shot by a firing squad. Hearing the shots, he relives an experience he has always anticipated: he sees his whole life projected on the blindfold like a film, from beginning to end. In his fiction, Chico Buarque has developed a highly original narrative style, here making brilliant use of film metaphor and techniques to create a richly visual world—a teeming square in the poor part of the city, a posh restaurant, a political rally—which rhythm and imagery carry the narrative in a skilful blend of poetry, music and story.

Clifford E. Landers is a professor of political science at Jersey City State College (USA). He has translated fiction by Jorge Amando, Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro, Marcos Rey, Rachel de Queiroz, Lima Barreto and Osman Lins.

Turbulence

Chico Buarque

Translated by Peter Bush

For twenty years Chico Buarque has been Brazil’s most popular composer, lyricist and performer.

Set in a city that can only be Rio, Turbulence evokes the surreal quality of urban Brazilian life through the comically hyperactive consciousness of the unnamed narrator, for the disturbing events of the novel occur as much in the country of the mind as in Brazil.

‘An undeniably haunting read’ Daily Telegraph

‘An intriguing cross-fertilisation of creative technique in a narrative as unpredictable as a sustained passage of jazz improvisation’ Independent

‘An unmistakably Brazilian text. A little like Ulysses turned inside out’ New Statesman

Epitaph of a Small Winner

Machado de Assis

Translated by William L. Grossman
with a new introduction by Louis de Bernières

A wickedly comic improvisation of a dead man’s scerbic commentary on his undistinguished life, by one of the greatest masters of Latin American and would literature.

‘If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible, then it’s no exaggeration to say that Machado is the writer who made Borges possible … It is one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature, and in this witty lucid translation it is a pure delight to read.’ Salman Rushdie

‘Fantastic … strange and wonderful.’ New York Times

Philosopher or Dog?

Machado de Assis

Translated by Clotilde Wilson
with a new introduction by Louis de Bernières

The rich and eccentric philosopher Quincas Borba leaves his fortune to his friend Rubiao, provided that he care for Quincas, the philosopher's dog. The dim-witted Rubiao is hardly prepared for the life that awaits him—‘What was he a year ago? A teacher. What is he now? A capitalist’—when he forsakes his quiet hometown for Quincas’ Rio mansion. With a masterful irony, Machado de Assis carefully delineates Rubiao’s exploits—as a lover, patron, and politician—in this fresh and astonishingly modern novel.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 into a poor mulatto family, Machado de Assis has been compared to Laurence Sterne and Samuel Beckett. He won recognition in the 1860s and 1870s, but a severe illness in 1879 marked a startling change in his style. Elected first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1897, on his death in Rio in 1908 he was given a state funeral. He is honoured to this day as one of Brazil’s great writers.