DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Love of Singular Men

Victor Heringer author James Young translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Peirene Press Ltd

Published:11th Jul '23

Should be back in stock very soon

The Love of Singular Men cover

Rio de Janeiro, the 1970s. One hot Brazilian summer, Camilo meets Cosme and the two teenage boys discover a new kind of tenderness. But an act of violence will shatter their intimate world, and change the trajectory of their young lives. At once an incisive exploration of Brazilian society and a moving account of first love, first grief and revenge, The Love of Singular Men is a powerful and exhilarating novel, which sparkles with wit and playful ingenuity throughout.

'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 ; 'Victor Heringer scrambles genres - tragic romance, pulpy noir, family drama - to plumb the false solace that narrative promises... its style, in James Young's deft translation, is itself bracing, depraved, and, in the way only something truly melancholic can be, very funny.' - Charlie Lee, The New York Review of Books ; 'The brief, precise scenes - incorporating photos, lists and handwritten passages - enable Heringer to cover a great deal in a short space and make a potentially gloomy story into a multilayered celebration of life. That the author died in 2018, aged 29, is a loss to international literature.' - John Self, The Guardian; 'Inventive, surprising and unsparing, The Love of Singular Men is just so unusually vivid. It's an unforgettable book, as sad as it is beautiful, as full of love as it is tragic.' - Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move and Sweet Home ; 'A formally playful, inventive and moving meditation on complicity and regret ... the exuberance of Heringer's prose is relayed beautifully in James Young's thoughtful translation.'- Andrew van der Vlies, The Times Literary Supplement ; 'Brazilian writer Victor Heringer died in 2018 aged 29, but we should be glad to have The Love of Singular Men to remember him by [...] The writing aches beautifully while still leaving space for profound healing and humanity. - Ronan Hession, The Irish Times ; 'An electrifying, passionate piece of writing - unlike anything I've read. What a loss. What a book.' - Toby Litt, author of A Writer's Diary and Patience ; 'One of the best novels of recent years.' - Asymptote; 'Heringer had little time to live, but he marked an entire generation of writers and readers.' - O Globo ; '[Camilo] endures the terrible events that play out over the course of the novel with an echoingly sad fortitude, writing beguilingly of the love he lost and then reclaimed. Heringer's novel is here to stay' – Paul Bailey, Literary Review

ISBN: 9781908670779

Dimensions: 198mm x 125mm x 23mm

Weight: unknown