Beatriz Bracher, born in São Paulo in 1961, grew up under the Brazilian military dictatorship. Her memories of that time intersect with the lives of people whose friends and lovers were tortured, exiled, and killed, as well as with those who did the killing. An editor, screenwriter, and the author of six books of fiction, Bracher has won three of Brazil’s most prestigious literary awards: the Clarice Lispector Prize, the Rio Prize, and the São Paulo Prize. A writer and translator based in California, Adam Morris has translated novels by Hilda Hilst and Joao Gilberto Noll.

"Accreting through cumulative and sometimes contradictory accounts of a crumbling São Paulo dynasty, this philosophical novel examines what people present and what they conceal, even from themselves....Bracher and translator Morris render a sophisticated, multifaceted portrait of a family that endures nevertheless through its decline and the prolonged fallout from the choices they made—or that were left them—through the lives they lived. An elegant and nuanced meditation on family, class, perception, illness, and death."