After a quarrel, an ageing lawyer leaves his wife and travels from
Brasília to the dry, lawless backlands of Brazil's northeastern plateau,
where he grew up. He has vague plans to start a new life, to buy a ranch
and farm cotton, but unresolved childhood obsessions, fantasies, traumas
resurface, threatening to overwhelm his very sense of identity. Consumed
with thoughts of revenge against the man who murdered his father when he
was only two, he discovers that he may in fact have been the lovechild
of his rich godfather--the man who ordered the hit--and may therefore be
the half-brother of the girl for whom he harbored an adolescent sexual
fixation. In this masterful novel rich in local color, João Almino
creates a complex, damaged narrator inexorably dragged down into the
vortex of his own treacherous memories.