translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz – published September 2026
Ten year old Moisés lives with his father, Mundinho, but is cared for by his older sister, Luzia, a hunchback, in Tapera do Paraguaçu, a rural village in Bahia on the Atlantic coast of Brazil. His other siblings have left, and their mother disappeared when he was very young.
Tapera is a ramshackle community of farmers and fishermen, though many of its residents have left in search of a better life. It is overlooked from a daunting seventeenth century monastery on a hill, from where its monks still rules have influence over the local area. Luzia works as a laundress in the monastery, but is taunted by the villagers as a witch because of her disability. She manages to persuade the monks to educate Moisés at the monastery school, more than his older brothers and sisters, she sees in him something different, and wants more from him than they achieved, a life toiling in the nearby city.
Vieira‘s first book in translation, Crooked Plow, also concerned a rural farming community, but this, the second in a trilogy, is better. There are elements of local folklore and a touch a magic that give its characters more detail and the story a moral and philosophical depth, permeated by the spectre of colonialism.
My GoodReads score 4 / 5
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