Items19The creator’s order
  1. 1Torto Arado (2019)Torto Arado (2019) 9.7/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2019Crooked Plow. Two sisters find a knife under their grandmother’s bed, and the injury that follows binds their lives together on a farm in rural Bahia. Choose this novel for the way family intimacy, spiritual life, and the struggle over land grow from that opening scene. Translated by Johnny Lorenz.0
  2. 2The Head of the Saint (2014)The Head of the Saint (2014)Published Jan 1, 2014Fourteen-year-old Samuel takes refuge inside the unfinished statue of a saint, where voices drift through the hollow concrete head. This young-adult novel is a good starting point for a short, playful book about a town that suddenly has reason to believe in miracles. Translated by Daniel Hahn.0
  3. 3The Words That Remain (2024)The Words That Remain (2024)Published Jan 1, 2024Raimundo has kept the letter Cícero sent him as a young man, but decades pass before he learns to read it. Choose this novel for the weight a few written words can carry when poverty and early work have closed off schooling, and love had to be hidden. Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato.0
  4. 4Dark Side of Skin (2024)Dark Side of Skin (2024)Published Jan 1, 2024The Dark Side of Skin. In Porto Alegre, Pedro turns to the objects his father left behind to make sense of his parents’ lives and his own. Read this novel for a son’s act of reconstruction and the small and large ways racism shaped his father’s life. Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato.0
  5. 5Of Cattle and Men (2023)Of Cattle and Men (2023)Published Jan 1, 2023In a remote slaughterhouse, Edgar Wilson takes care to calm the cattle before stunning them. Start here for a grim, spare novel about repetitive work and a man whose attention to the animals gives him reason to question what’s happening around him. Translated by Zoë Perry.0
  6. 6Free City (2013)Free City (2013)Published Jan 1, 2013A blog about the early years of Brasília draws comments from readers who have their own reasons for telling the city’s story differently. Choose this novel if you want to see the making of a capital through arguments over who gets credit and whose memory counts. Translated by Rhett McNeil.0
  7. 7Banzeiro Okoto (2023)Banzeiro Okoto (2023)Published Jan 1, 2023Journalist Eliane Brum moves from São Paulo to Altamira, where a vast dam changed life along the Xingu River. Read this blend of reportage and memoir for its attention to the people Brum meets and the assumptions she has to reconsider in her new home. Translated by Diane Whitty.0
  8. 8Macunaima (2023)Macunaima (2023)Published Jan 1, 2023A shapeshifter and his brothers leave their Amazon home in a novel that lets folk tales and several centuries crowd onto the same page. Choose it for a funny, unruly modernist epic. Katrina Dodson’s translation includes extensive notes if you want to follow the sources and wordplay.0
  9. 9Child of the Dark (2003)Child of the Dark (2003)Published Jan 1, 2003In this diary from 1950s São Paulo, Carolina Maria de Jesus writes on salvaged paper while collecting recyclables to feed her children. Choose it for the direct account of the work it takes to get through a day and the observations she makes in the time she finds to write. Translated by David St.…0
  10. 10Dona Flor e seus dais maridos (1966)Dona Flor e seus dais maridos (1966) 8.4/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1966Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. A cooking teacher in Salvador remarries after her husband dies during Carnival. His ghost has plans of its own. Pick this novel for a long comic read with recipes, gossip, desire, and the kind of complications that only a household with a ghost could have. Translated…0