Charco Press signs award-winning Brazilian novel

Independent publisher Charco Press has signed a "profound and moving" novel about family and society in Latin America by Julián Fuks entitled Resistance.

Resistence was awarded the Brazilian Jabuti Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2016 and last month won the José Saramago Literary Prize, worth €25,000 (£18,990).

Charco Press acquired world English rights from RCW Literary Agency to Resistance, which was originally published in Brazil in 2015.

The novel begins: "My brother was adopted, but I can not and do not want to say that my brother was adopted". This is the opening line written by Sebastián, the narrator of Fuks’s autobiographical novel where the memories of a country are dramatically linked to a family’s own memories.

The book is set in the "terrifying atmosphere" of late 1970’s Buenos Aires, and follows a young militant couple engaged in the resistance against the military regime adopts a child. The setting seemed to be at its worst: denounced by friends and colleagues, people were being captured by an abominable repressive apparatus and women would sometimes give birth during torture sessions.

Amid this ever-growing oppression, the couple and their baby flee to Brazil, believing it to be a more tranquil country to raise a family in and pursue their lives. The boy grows, his parents give him a brother and a sister, and the family relations become more intricate. As psychoanalysts, the parents are familiar with the theories on adopted and biological children, but life is always different from any specialized literature. It is up to Sebastián, the sensitive youngest son, to examine this past of violence and exile, and more importantly, to rewrite the family’s narrative.

"The result, written in a prose that is both lyrical and essayistic, is a powerful account where Sebastián’s intimate past and the history of a country overlap in an ingenious manner that reminds recent successes from Latin American fiction such as The Secret in Their Eyes", said the publisher.

Fuks is currently a protégé of Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted Mia Couto, one of Africa’s leading writers, in the Rolex’s Mentors and Protégés Arts Initiative.

Fuks was born in São Paulo in 1981. He has worked as a reporter for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and as a reviewer for the magazine Cult. Fuks is the author of several novels and collections of short stories and his work has been shortlisted for several prestigious prizes, including the Telecom Award and the São Paulo Prize for Literature. Resistence is his fifth and most recent book.