Solitaria: A Novel by Eliana Alves Cruz (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Literary - World Literature - Brazil - Political 

Translated by: Benjamin Brooks

RELEASE DATE: 8/5/2025 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE AND ARRIVE 1-2 DAYS AFTER THE RELEASE DATE)

The first work of translation on the Alchemy list: a raw, propulsive novel about a mother and daughter who work as live-in maids for the rich, and the tragedy they unwittingly bear witness to.

Mabel has been staying in the Golden Plate—the most expensive building on the block, in an unnamed city in Brazil—for almost her entire life. Yet her presence there is merely tolerated: she inhabits a miniscule room with her mother, Eunice, who alongside Mabel provides round-the-clock attention and care for the wealthy family who lives there. As Mabel grows up, her dissatisfaction with the forced smallness of her life becomes difficult to bear, and she is driven to work towards new possibilities for herself.

Eunice does the best that she can—uneducated, and with a daughter and ailing mother both depending solely on her, her life is a series of limitations. She moves through the rooms of the penthouse suite in silent servitude, and though Mabel is ashamed of this invisibility act they've both perfected, the era of slavery is still fresh in the country's consciousness, and Eunice thinks it best not to dwell too hard on such things. But when tragedy strikes, and a little boy dies, Eunice must decide if she can face the indifference and injustices of the ruling class she has spent so long orbiting.

Told through direct, agile and evocative prose, Solitaria is a liberation novel of the most rousing order. Through the book's awareness of space and whose presence is permissible, the world of the Golden Plate unfurls, and an unflinching portrait emerges of modern-day Brazil, its legacies of colonial violence haunting rooms across the country, both big and small.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Born in Rio de Janeiro, ELIANA ALVES CRUZ is a writer and journalist. Her debut novel, Água de Barrela, won the Oliveira Silveira award, from Fundação Palmares, in 2015. She is also the author of O crime do cais do Valongo (2018), Nada digo de ti, que em ti não Veja (2020), and A vestida: contos (2022), which won the Jabuti Award for Best Short Story. Solitaria is her most recent novel.

" Solitaria is a gem. The novel's clean and elegant architecture--life organized and thwarted across a series of rooms--reveals the intimate experience of power and powerlessness. The social hierarchy of the racial order is articulated subtlety in the spatial arrangements of servitude, all the little hidden rooms that sustain and support the world. The mother-daughter dyad at the center of the story details the intergenerational domination characteristic of the lives of those deemed disposable and at the same time offers the promise of breaking that hold and refusing servitude. I love that the rooms speak." --Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval