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André is a listless Brazilian teenager and the son of a successful plastic surgeon who lives a life of wealth and privilege, shuttling between the hot sands of Ipanema beach and his family's luxurious penthouse apartment. In 1985, when he is just sixteen, André's mother is killed in a car accident. Clouded with grief, André, his younger brother Thiago, and his father travel with their domestic help to Belem, a jungle city on the mouth of the Amazon, where the intense heat of the rainforest only serves to heighten their volatile emotions. After they arrive back in Rio, André's father loses himself in his work, while André spends his evenings in the family apartment with Luana, the beautiful daughter of the family's maid.
Three decades later, and now a successful surgeon himself, André is a middle-aged father, living in London, and recently separated from his British wife. He drinks too much wine and is plagued by recurring dreams. One day he receives an unexpected letter from Luana, which begins to reveal the other side of their story, a story André has long repressed.
In deeply affecting prose, debut novelist Luiza Sauma transports readers to a dramatic place where natural wonder and human desire collide. Cutting across race and class, time and place, from London to Rio to the dense humidity of the Amazon, Flesh and Bone and Water straddles two worlds with haunting meditations on race, sex, and power in a deftly plotted coming-of-age story about the nature of identity, the vicissitudes of memory, and how both can bend to protect us from the truth.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 20, 2017 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781508234777
- File size: 225719 KB
- Duration: 07:50:14
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 8, 2017
Sauma’s confident debut centers around André, a Brazilian doctor and father who’s living in London and recently separated from his British wife. When the first of several letters from Luana, the daughter of his father’s former live-in maid, arrives from across the ocean, André thinks back to the mid-1980s, when he was a wealthy teenager living in Rio de Janeiro. On the cusp of his 18th birthday, having recently lost his mother to a tragic car accident, the younger André spends his time working at his father’s plastic surgery firm, hanging with friends, and supporting his younger brother, Thiago. When he travels with his family to the Amazonian cities of Belém and Marajó to visit family and celebrate Christmas, however, young André begins to find himself drawn to the beautiful Luana, and it isn’t long before this attraction blossoms into a secret romance. Attentive readers may anticipate the novel’s eventual twists, but Sauma’s excellent prose is thoroughly consuming, bouncing between continents and eras to create a complicated tale of class, ancestry, and love in which happy endings are difficult to find but hope remains. -
Born into a wealthy, privileged family in Brazil, Andre Cabral is now an adult with his own family. A practicing doctor in London, he receives a letter from Brazil that sends him reeling with reminiscences of fateful events that transpired there before he left the country for his schooling. Charlie Anson's British-accented narration provides the voice for Andre. Anson's reading is thoughtful and reflective, capturing a man who is transported back in time, audibly intoxicated by memories and full of wonder at the past while shocked at new revelations. Snippets of letters from Luana, Andre's family's "empregada," or maid, are read with gentle subtlety by Kristin Atherton, also with a British accent. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
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