The Dark Side of Skin

Life under Brazil’s brutal “cordial racism” comes painfully alive in this novel of fathers and sons.

How do you become the protagonist of your own life? For Pedro, it means searching for his murdered father in the objects he left behind—an archeology of affections. Investigating and retracing his family’s trajectory through the streets of the city of Porto Alegre and the morass of Brazil’s pervasive racism, violence, and bankrupt institutions, Jeferson Tenório takes on fathers and sons, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the inescapable bonds and burdens of family and history in one delicately rendered, painfully precise account of loved ones lost and found.