What Is Mine

‘A very beautiful book.’
— Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2022

'A son’s journey, around father and country, subtle and complex, tender and brutal; an intimate work of rare beauty and power.’
— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street 

‘What Is Mine is an unforgettable oral history of truck driving along the potholed roads carving up the Amazon rainforest: bandits, sleep deprivation, beef barbecued on the engine. It is also an incisive political critique of ecocidal ideas of “progress”, a powerful reflection on the ways labour shapes a human body, and a loving exploration of a relationship between a father and son. It already has the feel of a classic.’
— Caleb Klaces, author of Fatherhood

'A political document told as memoir, this is a book of incredible beauty and insight, one which demonstrates one of the greatest truths: that our lives, and the lives of our families, are inextricably bound to the structures of class, economics, and history they were born into.'
— Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

‘Powerful in its atomization of the Brazilian style of “capitalist devastation” that goes by the name of progress, movingly tender in its evocation of an Odysseus of a father, a long-distance trucker who plays a part in the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, this is a memoir like no other. I read it in one great gulp, unable to put it down. Brilliant!’
— Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness

‘What Is Mine is both a political history of Brazil and a devoted paean to a parent and child bond that remains tenderly interwoven across social stratification. With boundless love and empathy, Bortoluci deftly elucidates the fateful relation between bodies, nations and ecologies, and the ways in which the cancer in Didi’s endurant body is itself colonial, as likewise, ecocidal expansion across Brazil is carcinogenic, both working by expansionist logics.’
— Abi Andrews, author of The Word for Woman Is Wilderness 

‘José Henrique Bortoluci's What Is Mine is an extraordinarily powerful portrait of a man's life, a country's course and the "ancient marriage between shamelessness and devastation" in Brazilian history. Tender, thought-provoking, incisive and humane, it's a deeply intelligent road movie for the soul. A beautiful and moving journey through a trucker's memories of a changing nation and a vital meditation on class, capitalism and, above all else, the search for human dignity. Utterly transfixing.’
— Julian Hoffman, author of Irreplaceable

‘Bortoluci opens with a portrait of his childhood, which was economically precarious but emotionally tender, even as his father was absent for long stretches of time. In the 2010s, as Didi’s health declined due to cancer, Bortoluci sat down to record the details of his father’s adventures. From the 1960s through the early aughts, Didi saw more of Brazil than most of its citizens. He illuminates for Bortoloci how regime changes influenced the country’s infrastructure, and how his and his friends’ attitudes about social mobility shifted as they learned just how perilous their work was and how underpaid they were for it. Didi’s evocative account of life on the road touches on the obstacles (mudholes) and distractions (brothels) faced by time-crunched drivers, but most memorable is his chilling description of the 1970s construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which tore through small towns and caused massive deforestation. With its twin focus on family and country, this unique memoir makes for moving and edifying reading.’
— Publisher’s Weekly

‘[A] truly extraordinary book – already a classic of the genre … [By] portraying a single life as a result of the interplay between often contradictory forces, it reinforces how the private is always political and the importance of bearing witness.’
— Bartolomeo Sala, Something Curated

‘The reflection on Brazilian problems (the disastrous Amazon integration project, the country's political deterioration) and also on issues that recur regardless of geography (the exploitation of the working class and the environment, disease, relationships between parents and children) is one of the triumphs of What Is Mine.’
— O Globo

‘Father José Bortoluci, Didi, embodies a figure at once fundamental and renegade in Brazilian history, ignored in national narratives or condensed into an abstract stereotype.... The book gives a name and individuality to the truck driver.’
— Folha de S. Paulo