The Shape of Bones
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
'Like a cross of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and American Psycho' Financial Times
From one of Brazil's foremost literary voices comes a gripping, visceral new novel about youth, power and the nature of manhood
A man rises at 5 a.m. and leaves his home. He does not wake his wife or child to bid them goodbye. He starts his car - an SUV filled with survival gear - but does not drive to his friend's house as planned. Instead he glides through the sleeping streets of Porto Alegre, haunted by ghosts of himself: the fearless boy riding a battered stunt bike, the silent adolescent fascinated by bodies and violence, the obsessive young surgeon, the distant husband.
As the dawn comes on and people slowly fill the streets, the man drives unthinkingly, inexorably, toward the old neighbourhood of his youth. What is pulling him back there? Perhaps the need to make something happen, perhaps just nostalgia. Or perhaps the search for absolution - from a crime he has carried in his heart for fifteen years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A strikingly potent coming-of-age story set mostly on the streets of Esplanada, a rapidly changing area in northeast Brazil in the early 1990s, Galera's novel moves seamlessly between past and present to deliver a moving portrait of a man haunted by the ghosts of his youth and a senseless tragedy that would change the course of his life. The unnamed narrator in the present day, known only as Hermano in flashbacks to his childhood, is visiting the old neighborhood en route to pick up a friend for an ambitious and dangerous rock-climbing expedition that "promised to be the biggest adventure of his life." But upon entering Esplanada in the early morning, he is struck by the return of a crippling shame that he thought he had left behind long ago. The past catches up to the present as he intervenes in a gang conflict eerily reminiscent of one that he had fled from as an adolescent. Examining masculinity and the responsibility we have to others in violent yet hauntingly intimate scenes, Galera (Blood-Drenched Beard) illuminates the murky spaces between who we believe ourselves to be and who we really are. The result is a harrowing, expertly structured work of fiction.
