Caminhando com os mortos
Walking with the Dead
by Micheliny Verunschk
Companhia das Letras 2023
144 pages
14×21 cm
From the author of The Sound of the Jaguar’s Roar, winner of the Jabuti Prize 2022, an impactful novel about the wicked consequences of intolerance and extreme religious dogmas.
A shocking crime astounds the population of a village in Brazil’s countryside: a woman is burned alive in a religious ritual to purify the victim and make her walk the “path of light”. Violence seems to become a part of the landscape: since the evangelical community established itself in the region, such events became recurring. We’ll have to collect the fragments of this tragic incident, while following the clues of a woman who is trying to do the same – and to face her own trauma and the loss of a dear friend. The award-winning writer Micheliny Verunschk creates a fresh novel frighteningly grounded in reality, showing how the hate towards women and minorities runs back centuries, especially when its roots come from religious fanaticism.
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Press:
«Micheliny Verunschk dives further into the story of the colonization of the Americas through an extremely personal and awful experience, highlighting how religions have always been the driving force behind the project which helped destroy a people and their costumes, their lands, their happiness, and their relationship with the divine.»
Natalia Borges Polesso
«Who comes to the regions where everything is made of absence? What do they do when they come to occupy these spaces? Walking with the dead is about the fire capable of burning Celeste in the town of Tapuio, other women in Brazil, and so many witches in the course of human history.»
Manuela d’Ávila
«How does tragedy build through a web of violence, and silent ones at that? Fulfilling the role of the best of good fiction and provoking tension with reality in its imaginary potency, Micheliny Verunschk takes the reader by the hand and journeys through the language of the countryside of Brazil that is very ra- rely seen, where there lives a beast that can devour its hunter. If in her lauded debut book it was the jaguar that roared, in this one, there’s only silence. A haunted type of silence.»
Bianca Ramoneda
Rights sold: Italy
Rights available: All other territories
Represented in collaboration with MTS Agência
Micheliny Verunschk (Recife, 1972) is a Brazilian writer and poet. She completed a master in Literary Criticism at the Pontifical University of São Paulo and a PhD in Communication and Semiotic at the same university. She published the books of poems Geografia Íntima do Deserto (Landy 2003), O Observador e o Nada (Edições Bagaço, 2003) and A Cartografia da Noite (Lumme Editor, 2010), and the novels nossa Teresa (Editora Patuá 2014) and the three novels of her Trilógia infernal (Editora Patuá 2020), a trilogy set during the Brazilian dictatorship. Her fifth novel, O Som do Rugido da Onça, won the Jabuti Prize 2022.
* For any info about Micheliny Verunschk’s other publications please contact us at info@redondobooks.com *
