Award-winning Brazilian novelist Adriana Lisboa's UK debut is a vibrant coming-of-age tale with a political edge
Granta's inaugural Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, published last year, was an effort to bridge what the editors, Roberto Feith and Marcelo Ferroni, described as the "gap between the vitality of Brazilian literature and its presence in the world". Adriana Lisboa's work is something of a case in point. Crow Blue is her 10th book. Her previous works have garnered much critical acclaim and won multiple awards and places on literary prize shortlists in her native Brazil, but this is her first UK publication.
When her mother dies, 13-year-old Vanja leaves the "crow-blue" shells of Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro behind and goes to live in Colorado with her estranged stepfather, Fernando, a one-time Araguaia freedom fighter, now a political exile working as a security guard and part-time cleaner. Fernando, whose marriage to Vanja's mother broke up before Vanja was even born, welcomes his sort-of daughter into his home, and the pair set out on a "treasure hunt" to find her biological father – an American from Albuquerque about whom she knows little – in what becomes a classic coming-of-age narrative that also explores the dark side of Brazil's political history. Crow Blue is ultimately a vibrant and hopeful story about how we find our families and where we make our homes.
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