When you read something genuinely new it’s hard to describe it—you end up settling for comparisons—and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It’s ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.
—Zadie Smith
The gripping English debut of the famous and hugely talented Brazilian writer Victor Heringer, who died tragically young
In a Rio de Janeiro suburb in the 1970s, a family—the parents, their daughter, and crippled teenage son Camilo—take in an orphan named Cosme. The teen boys unexpectedly fall in love, but their intimate world is shattered when Cosme is killed by a neighbor in a brutal hate crime. Decades later, Camilo returns to his hometown, still haunted by this violence and the long shadow of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
A fluid, queer coming-of-age story as well as an incisive and unforgiving exploration of Brazilian society and politics, Victor Heringer’s moving novel is worthy of Machado de Assis.
When you read something genuinely new it’s hard to describe it—you end up settling for comparisons—and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It’s ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.
