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The prize winning international bestseller - 800,000 copies sold in Brazil
Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024
Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.'
Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.
Heralded as a new masterpiece, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath, and political struggle.
Translated by Johnny Lorenz.
Itamar Vieira Junior
Itamar Vieira Junior was born in Salvador, Brazil, in 1979. He holds a doctorate in Ethnic and Africana Studies. His debut novel Crooked Plow won the 2018 LeYa Award (Portugal) and the 2020 Jabuti Award for Best Novel (Brazil). The book has sold over a million copies in Brazil, and the English translation was shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize. His second novel, Saving the Fire, won the 2024 Jabuti Award for Best Novel.
More by Itamar Vieira Junior
Johnny Lorenz
Translated by
Johnny Lorenz, born in 1972, son of Brazilian immigrants to the US, is a translator, poet and Professor at Montclair State University. He translated Clarice Lispector's A Breath of Life and The Besieged City. His translation of Itamar Vieira Junior's Crooked Plow received support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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