Crooked Plow

Our Reading Around the World theme is staying in South America for its B read and we are heading for Brazil.

Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel Crooked Plow was shortlisted for the The International Booker Prize 2024.

‘I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'”Say something!” she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.’

Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

Heralded as a new masterpiece and the most important Brazilian novel of this century, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in the Brazil’s poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery in that country is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath and political struggle.

Please contact us to book in if you would like to join our reading group session to review this book.

The book is available to reserve from our bookshop HERE.

As a reminder, our Reading Group sessions tend to reach full attendance capacity, so booking in beforehand is essential.