The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer

Rio de Janeiro, the 1970s. 

One hot Brazilian summer, Camilo meets Cosme and the two teenage boys discover a new kind of tenderness. But an act of violence will shatter their intimate world, and change the trajectory of their young lives.

At once an incisive exploration of Brazilian society and a moving account of first love, first grief and revenge, The Love of Singular Men is a powerful and exhilarating novel, which sparkles with wit and playful ingenuity throughout.

'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

‘An electrifying, passionate piece of writing - unlike anything I’ve read. Most novels are, at base, very responsible pieces of work. Not headstrong or wayward. They don’t allow themselves the excursions and incoherences that life is full of. But Victor Heringer’s writing manages to pull off the miraculous feat of simultaneously playing constant truant to itself and being entirely present and focussed, first line to last. I don’t know how this was achieved (and also in this fantastic translation by James Young), but I’m very glad it was. What a loss. What a book.'- Toby Litt, author of A Writer’s Diary and Patience

'Of profound modesty and profound depths and profound beauty, it touches the soul of tragedy, the fact that hatred has such radioactive endurance [...] On one level, The Love of Singular Men is the most gorgeous queer coming-of-age story, and on another, it is a reckoning with homophobia so intense in the macho years of the dictatorship that murder seems the natural result of love.' - Barbara Epler, Tank Magazine

‘Inventive, surprising and unsparing, The Love of Singular Men is just so unusually vivid. It’s an unforgettable book, as sad as it is beautiful, as full of love as it is tragic.’ - Wendy Erksine, author of Dance Move and Sweet Home

Translated from Portuguese by James Young

Paperback / 184 pages