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This Brazilian selection connects cities, backlands and plantations rather than reducing the country to one aesthetic. Machado de Assis and Lispector unsettle narrative authority, while Amado, Ramos and Guimarães Rosa explore different worlds of exclusion. Evaristo, Carolina Maria de Jesus and Vieira Junior foreground Black experience and the persistence of slavery’s hierarchies. Nassar, Lisboa and Hatoum turn to intimate conflict, family secrets and migration’s legacies.
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A dead aristocrat recounts his life, exposing privilege, vanity and social pretence.
Original title: Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
Penguin Classics
Translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
Edition source ↗
A narrator attempts to tell the life of Macabéa, a poor typist living in Rio de Janeiro.
Original title: A hora da estrela
Wydawnictwo Literackie · 1987
Translated by Anna Hermanowicz-Pałka
Edition source ↗
A group of homeless boys forms its own community in the port city of Salvador.
Original title: Capitães da Areia
Fabiano’s family crosses northeastern Brazil, fleeing drought and poverty.
Original title: Vidas secas
Riobaldo recalls life as a jagunço, warfare in the backlands and his troubling bond with Diadorim.
Original title: Grande sertão: veredas
Ponciá’s life reveals rural-to-urban migration and slavery’s legacy in a Black woman’s experience.
Original title: Ponciá Vicêncio
A couple’s passionate encounter becomes a furious dispute about power, bodies and language.
Original title: Um copo de cólera
Two sisters grow up in rural Bahia, where labour on the land preserves slavery’s legacy.
Original title: Torto arado
Sisters Clarice and Maria Inês grow up in the shadow of family violence and unspoken trauma.
Original title: Sinfonia em branco
A São Paulo favela resident’s diary documents hunger, single motherhood and the struggle to write.
Original title: Quarto de despejo
The rivalry of twins exposes fractures within a Lebanese-Brazilian family in Manaus.
Original title: Dois irmãos
Joana’s interior monologue moves from childhood through a failing marriage toward independence.
An encounter with a cockroach in a maid’s room provokes a wealthy sculptor’s crisis of identity.
Sources on authors and their connections to this country. Specific edition details appear beside each book. Polish and English originals are not labelled as translations.