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  • Published: 6 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241964873
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 168
Categories:

The Shape of Bones





A visceral coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of violence and turbulent desire in the blistering Brazilian suburbs

Hermano rises at 5 a.m. and leaves his home in an SUV filled with survival gear. He doesn't wake his wife or child to bid them goodbye - neither does he meet his best friend at their pre-arranged rendezvous point. Driving through the sleeping streets of Porto Alegre, he is haunted by ghosts of his past selves: the fearless boy riding a battered stunt bike, the silent adolescent fascinated by bodies and violence, the obsessive young surgeon, the distant husband.

As the dawn comes on and people slowly fill the streets, Hermano finds himself driving unthinkingly, inexorably, back to the old neighbourhood of his youth, looking for absolution from a crime he has carried in his heart for fifteen years.

  • Published: 6 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241964873
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 168
Categories:

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Praise for The Shape of Bones

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'

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'

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

Vividly radiates a sense of unease and menace. I found myself constantly absorbed by it

New Statesman on 'Blood-Drenched Beard'
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