Luís Fernando Veríssimo – författare

A frustrated publisher receives a mysterious angst-ridden manuscript: 'a friend' must send it in installments; its contents would put the author in danger. As he pieces together the story, he learns that the author is the wife of one of the two Martelli brothers - gangsters who dominate a small town in the Brazilian interior. Surely her dark outpourings are a cry for help? One by one, he dispatches his motley collection of friends to Frondosa - a town totally obsessed with five-a-side football - to investigate and to bring her to safety.

With the knowledge that every mouthful may be your last comes a special flavor, an added piquancy, that is hard to resist. Not for nothing is gluttony a deadly sin.At first there were ten of them. Once the gilded youth of their city, they would meet each month to dine fabulously and celebrate their friendship and singularity. But 20 years on, the world is not as impressed with them as they anticipated. Indignant girlfriends, distrustful wives, bankruptcy, divorce and death have weakened their bond - until Daniel meets Lucidio. In his new friend Daniel thinks he has found the recipe to reinvigorate their meetings. Lucidio is mysteriously taciturn but in the privacy of Daniel's kitchen, his genius recreates their favourite dishes as a gastronomic experience like no other. One helping is never enough. Particularly for a group that have always wanted more ...

Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the centre of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kabbala, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee's 'Eternal Orang-utan', which would end up by writing all the known books in the cosmos.