Solitaria - Eliana Alves Cruz, Benjamin Brooks (Translator)

Written by Eliana Alves Cruz, Benjamin Brooks (Translator)
Read by Madeleine Claude
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

For fans of Fernanda Melchor and Tove Ditlevsen, a raw, propulsive novel by an award-winning Afro-Brazillian novelist about a Black mother and daughter who work as live-in maids for a rich family in an unnamed Brazilian city, and the tragedy to which they unwittingly bear witness.

Eunice works for a rich family in a building called The Golden Plate, in an unnamed city in contemporary Brazil. She lives with her daughter Mabel in a small room assigned to them. Eunice does the best that she can, though with a child and ailing mother both dependent solely on her, Eunice’s life is a series of limitations. As Mabel grows up, her dissatisfaction with the forced smallness of their world becomes difficult to bear, and she is driven to work towards new possibilities for herself. But when tragedy strikes, and a little boy dies, both women must decide whether to speak out about the injustices they have spent so long orbiting.

Told in direct, agile and evocative prose, Solitaria is a liberation novel of the most rousing order. Through the book’s examination of spaces and whose presence within them is permissible, the world of the Golden Plate unfurls, and an unflinching portrait emerges of modern-day Brazil, its legacies of colonial violence still haunting rooms, big and small, across the country.

“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

Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
Release date: 08-05-25

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