After being inseparable for over fifty years, Otto suddenly loses his wife Ada. They shared everything; they cooked together, took out the trash together, played table tennis and shared a mutual love for cauliflower. Now, time stands still in the yellow house and while Otto doesn’t want to have anything to do with his neighbours, he is faced with the vivid life outside the safe walls of loneliness. Little by little Otto gets curious and slowly gets to know his neighbours and their curiosities: a pharmacist addicted to investigating side effects, the always singing mailman who keeps mixing up the mail, a young newlywed anthropologist who watches her favourite documentary every night and the upstairs neighbour and her three horrible dogs who is afflicted by a cockroach infestation. Otto is getting convinced there is a secret in which Ada seems to have been involved and the town is trying to hide, and he is determined to find out more.

“Chock full of highly entertaining characters all trying to hide a secret, Noites de Alface captures village life at its most vivid” – Mertin-litag

In 2012 Vanessa Barbara was selected as one of the twenty new promising authors in Brazilian literature by Granta magazine. Her first solo novel Noites de Alface presents the bizarre day-to-day life of a village coping with the loss of one of their most beloved residents with a good share of humour and partly based on the author’s own neighbourhood. Vanessa Barbara takes the reader along on a search for clues that are phenomenally woven through out the novel.

Noites de Alface will soon be translated in French (Editions Zulma), Italian (Garzanti), Czech (Albatros), Swedish (Natur & Kultur) and German (A1 Verlag).

Vanessa Barbara, Noites de Alface. Rio de Janeiro: Alfaguara, 2013.