Flesh and Bone and Water
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Brazilian-born doctor André Cabral is living in London when one day he receives a letter from his home country, which he left nearly thirty years ago. A letter he keeps in his pocket for weeks, but tells no one about.
The letter prompts André to remember the days of his youth - torrid afternoons on Ipanema beach with his listless teenage friends, parties in elegant Rio apartments, his after-school job at his father's plastic surgery practice - and, above all, his secret infatuation with the daughter of his family's maid, the intoxicating Luana. Unable to resist the pull of the letter, André embarks on a journey back to Brazil to rediscover his past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sauma's confident debut centers around Andr , a Brazilian doctor and father who's living in London and recently separated from his British wife. When the first of several letters from Luana, the daughter of his father's former live-in maid, arrives from across the ocean, Andr thinks back to the mid-1980s, when he was a wealthy teenager living in Rio de Janeiro. On the cusp of his 18th birthday, having recently lost his mother to a tragic car accident, the younger Andr spends his time working at his father's plastic surgery firm, hanging with friends, and supporting his younger brother, Thiago. When he travels with his family to the Amazonian cities of Bel m and Maraj to visit family and celebrate Christmas, however, young Andr begins to find himself drawn to the beautiful Luana, and it isn't long before this attraction blossoms into a secret romance. Attentive readers may anticipate the novel's eventual twists, but Sauma's excellent prose is thoroughly consuming, bouncing between continents and eras to create a complicated tale of class, ancestry, and love in which happy endings are difficult to find but hope remains.
