Flesh and Bone and Water

Sauma’s confident debut centers around André, a Brazilian doctor and father who’s living in London and recently separated from his British wife. When the first of several letters from Luana, the daughter of his father’s former live-in maid, arrives from across the ocean, André thinks back to the mid-1980s, when he was a wealthy teenager living in Rio de Janeiro. On the cusp of his 18th birthday, having recently lost his mother to a tragic car accident, the younger André spends his time working at his father’s plastic surgery firm, hanging with friends, and supporting his younger brother, Thiago. When he travels with his family to the Amazonian cities of Belém and Marajó to visit family and celebrate Christmas, however, young André begins to find himself drawn to the beautiful Luana, and it isn’t long before this attraction blossoms into a secret romance. Attentive readers may anticipate the novel’s eventual twists, but Sauma’s excellent prose is thoroughly consuming, bouncing between continents and eras to create a complicated tale of class, ancestry, and love in which happy endings are difficult to find but hope remains. (June)