The Love of Singular Men

£12.99

Available to pre-order for delivery on publication (11th July 2023), or subscribe now to receive this title in April.

Rio de Janeiro, the 1970s. Young Camilo leads a sheltered life, protected from the brutal realities of Brazil’s military dictatorship and the cruelty of the world beyond his back garden. But the day his father brings home Cosme marks the end of this safe and predictable childhood. Who is this boy? Where has he come from? No one explains and Cosme becomes part of the family. Camilo instinctively hates him, but hate soon turns to love as the boys explore their feelings for each other. Told by the adult Camilo, haunted by his past and living alone in his old neighbourhood, The Love of Singular Men is a coming-of-age story like no other. Combining an incisive exploration of Brazilian social issues with a tender account of first love, first grief and revenge, it sparkles with wit, energy and playful ingenuity throughout.

184pp, paperback with flaps, £12.99
ISBN 978-1-908670-77-9
Publication date: 11th July 2023

Press & Reviews

'When you read something genuinely new it's hard to describe it - you end up settling for comparisons - and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It's ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.' - Zadie Smith

‘One of the best novels of recent years.’ - Asymptote

Heringer had little time to live, but he marked an entire generation of writers and readers. - O Globo

The work that Victor Heringer leaves behind is enough to place him among the great names of contemporary Brazilian literature. - Scothilia

About The Book

Author

Victor Heringer was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. His first poetry collection, Automatógrafo, was published in 2011, followed by his debut novel, Glória, which won the 2013 Jabuti Prize. His second novel, The Love of Singular Men, was published in 2016, and was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature, the Rio Prize and the Oceanos Prize. He also published O escritor Victor Heringer (2015), a conceptual book of photographs, contributed a weekly column to the literary magazine Pessoa and translated from English to Portuguese. In 2017 he was selected by Forbes for their ‘under 30’ list. Victor Heringer died in 2018, three weeks before his thirtieth birthday. Following his death, Companhia das Letras reissued all of his works and a complete anthology of his poems. In 2021, they published a collection of his non-fiction writing, Vida desinteressante, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Jabuti Prize. 

Translator

James Young is a translator and writer from Northern Ireland and is the winner of the 2022 Peirene Stevns Prize. His short stories have appeared in publications including Wasafiri, ShortFiction and The Honest Ulsterman, and been shortlisted for the 2019 Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the 2020 Fish Short Story Prize and the 2021 Bath Short Story Award. He is the editor of Short Fiction literary journal and runs the Hastings Writers Workshop. He lived in Brazil between 2005 and 2017, working as a teacher, translator and journalist. The Love of Singular Men is his first novel­ length translation.

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