Violeta among the Stars

Dulce Maria Cardoso is a Portuguese writer, who spent her childhood in Luanda, Angola after her parents moved there when she was an infant. Her family returned to Portugal following the Angolan War of Independence in 1975. She studied law at the University of Lisbon and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. Her first novel, Campo de Sangue, won the Grand Prize Acontece de Romance, Violeta among the Stars won the EU Prize for Literature and O Chão dos Pardais won the Portuguese Pen Club Award.

Desperate and drunk, Violeta overturns her car on a lonely stretch of late-night motorway. As she lies amid the wreckage of her car, suspended between this world and the next, Violeta's life quite literally flashes before her eyes. Scenes from her past overlap with what happened right before the accident: her upbringing with her distant, critical mother; her troubled relationship with her daughter who is everything to her grandparents that Violeta never could be; her life on the road as she drives between waxing product-selling appointments with breaks at motorway service stations, the abuse from other travellers mocking her size, the terrible service station cafes, the alcohol, the risky encounters with lorry drivers on filthy public toilet floors...Suspended in this eternity, Violeta examines her life and what it consists of: the thousand daily grievances that add up to a frustrated, thwarted life.She begins to sink into her past. The Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, the defining historical moment of her life. Love, passion, sex - the dreams of adolescence sacrificed to failed relationshipsVioleta Among the Stars reads like an epic poem, weaving Violeta's memories, thoughts, feelings to narrate a story that consists of dozens of scenes, voices, flashes and memories. Violeta reflecting on her death, her life, her reality and her dreams.