The Shape of Bones

Description

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, gliding through the sleeping streets of Porto Alegre, he is haunted by ghosts of himself: the fearless boy riding a battered stunt bike, the silent adolescent fascinated by violence, the obsessive young surgeon, the distant husband. As the dawn comes on and people slowly fill the streets, the man drives unthinkingly, inexorably, back to the old neighbourhood of his youth. What is pulling him back there? Perhaps the need to make something happen, perhaps just nostalgia. Or perhaps he is looking for absolution - from a crime he has carried in his heart for fifteen years.

Daniel Galera (Author) Daniel Galera was born in Sao Paulo in 1979. He co-founded the influential publishing house Livros do Mal, and has translated David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Irvine Welsh into Brazilian Portuguese. He has published a collection of short stories and three novels, including Blood-Drenched Beard, as well as an acclaimed graphic novel (with Rafael Coutinho).

Masterful, compelling and stylish . . . Galera draws so much life into a single line, leading beyond the pages of the book and out to the horizon -- Barney Norris, author of 'Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain' Ferociously intelligent... A tense, atmospheric meditation on the hypnotic pull of the past. Daniel Galera is a thrilling writer, and this novel is nothing short of essential -- Laura van den Berg, author of 'Find Me' Publisher's description. A visceral coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of violence and turbulent desire in the blistering Brazilian suburbs. Taut with the threat of sex and savagery, this is a book about bodies and their limits, about how it feels to be young and what it means to become a man. * Penguin * Daniel Galera understands that violence is mysteriously capable of restoring a person to reality and preparing him to meet his moment of grace. His characters bear life's inevitable weight of guilt and shame, all the while striving to resolve the fearful events of the past -- Susanna Moore, author of 'The Life of Objects' Vividly radiates a sense of unease and menace. I found myself constantly absorbed by it * New Statesman on 'Blood-Drenched Beard' * Coolly seductive, expansively mythic, with an unsettling sense of something indefinably out of joint beneath a veneer of small-town normality. . . . A tensely atmospheric novel [with] a dangerous undertow * Guardian on 'Blood-Drenched Beard' *