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  • Published: 1 August 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241964880
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99

The Shape of Bones




Visceral coming-of-age story played out amid the blistering backstreets of Brazil - a darkly fascinating look at masculinity

A man rises at 5am and silently leaves his home. He starts his car - its trunk filled with survival gear - and glides through the sleeping streets of Porto Alegre, haunted by ghosts of 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 dawn breaks and people slowly fill the streets, the man finds himself driving back to his childhood home. What is pulling him there? Perhaps the need to make something happen, perhaps just nostalgia. Or perhaps the search for absolution - for a secret crime he has carried in his heart for fifteen years.

  • Published: 1 August 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241964880
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99

Also by Daniel Galera

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Praise for The Shape of Bones

Impressive, visceral and tender . . . A work of art whose echoes persist long after the final page

David Mitchell, author of 'Cloud Atlas'

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'

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'

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'