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Brazilian-born doctor André Cabral is living in London when one day he receives a letter from his home country, which he left nearly thirty years ago. A letter he keeps in his pocket for weeks, but tells no one about.

The letter prompts André to remember the days of his youth - torrid afternoons on Ipanema beach with his listless teenage friends, parties in elegant Rio apartments, his after-school job at his father´s surgery plastic practice - and, above all, his secret infatuation with the daughter of his family´s maid, the intoxicating Luana. Unable to resist the pull of the letter, André embarks on a journey back to Brazil to rediscover his past.

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An arresting debut about memory and trauma. In this respect and others, it resembles Julian Barnes´s Man Booker-winner, The Sense of an Ending. Sauma, whose style manages to be both spare and rich, is clear-eyed about the social and racial divides in Rio Daily Telegraph

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Luiza Sauma was born in Rio de Janeiro and raised in London. After studying English at the University of Leeds, she worked at the Independent on Sunday for several years. She has an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was awarded the Pat Kavanagh Award in 2014, and she has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

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