Blue Flowers

Carola Saavedra is the author of several novels in Brazilian Portuguese, including the award-winning Blue Flowers. She lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Daniel Hahn is an award-winning writer, editor, and translator with more than sixty books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish, and French) have won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award and have been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among others.

Ravishing as if Saavedra were a modern-day Borges.   Luis Alberto Urrea, O, The Oprah Magazine

A novel of dark obsession, missed connections, and violent love.

Marcos has just been through a divorce and moved into a new apartment. He feels alienated from his ex-wife, from his daughter, from society; everything feels flat and fake to him. He begins to receive letters at his new address from an anonymous troubled woman who signs off as A. and who clearly believes she is writing to the former tenant, her ex-lover, in the aftermath of a violent heartbreak. Marcos falls under the spell of the manic, hypnotic missives and for the first time in years, something moves him.

Blue Flowers alternates between the letters detailing the dissolution of A.'s relationship, and Marcos' growing fixation with this damaged person. The letters become a kind of exorcism as both A.'s epistolary affair and Marcos' personal life reach a crisis point. Possessed by A., he is driven to discover her true identity. Blue Flowers is a dark portrait of desire, undermining accepted truths about love and sex, violence and fear, men and women.