Blood-Drenched Beard
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Blood-Drenched Beard is the gripping, visceral English-language debut from Daniel Galera.
His father shoots himself, and all he's left with is the old cattle dog and a vague desire for explanation. He loves swimming so he drifts south to Garopaba, a quiet little town on the Brazilian coast, where his grandfather disappeared in mysterious, possibly brutal, circumstances decades before.
There, in the midst of romantic flings and occasional trips, he comes to discover more than he could ever have imagined - not just about his grandfather, but also about himself.
Praise for Daniel Galera:
'Outstandingly powerful'- Estado de Sao Paulo
'The writer who has evolved more than any other of his generation'- NoMinimo
Daniel Galera was born in Sao Paulo in 1979. He co-founded the influential publishing house Livros do Mal, and has translated David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Irvine Welsh into Brazilian Portuguese. He has published a collection of short stories and three novels, as well as an acclaimed graphic novel (with Rafael Coutinho).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brazilian writer Galera's novel follows a young man in a beautiful but impoverished coastal town as he tries to uncover the details behind his grandfather's death. Still reeling from a complicated breakup, the unnamed protagonist visits his ailing father, where he's told the mysterious story of his grandfather's murder: no body was ever recovered, no guilty party ever found. After the young man's father dies, the listless fellow leaves Porto Alegre for coastal Garopaba, desperately seeking some kind of personal peace while also searching out the truth about his grandfather's end. The bulk of the story has the young man exploring tropical settings, exercising, or attempting to infiltrate the loose social network of Garopaba's highly secretive, nefarious inhabitants. The task is made significantly more difficult by the young man's rare condition he's unable to recognize faces, even those of people he's known for years, within minutes of looking away from them. This blunt translation presents a stoic journey of self-discovery, the murder mystery functioning merely as a backdrop. Galera's keen sense of characters and unflinching depictions of the sometimes awkward desperation of coastal life ground the story and give it a gritty feel that is consistently satisfying.
