If I Close My Eyes Now

(Paperback)

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Description

Prize-winning murder mystery novel in which two boy detectives solve a crime in 1960s Brazil - reminiscent of Niccolo Ammaniti's I'M NOT SCARED, STAND BY ME and TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD If I close my eyes now, I can still feel her blood on my fingers. If only I had closed my eyes then, or kept my mouth shut, not told anyone about our discovery by the swimming hole, we could have gone back to dreaming about spaceships. A horrifying discovery by two young boys while playing in a mango plantation marks the end of their childhood. As they finally open their eyes to the adult world, they see a place where storybook heroes don't exist but villains and lies do ...

Reviews

Deceptively simple .. evokes the special nature of childhood friendships * Daily Mail *
Silvestre has fun with the murder mystery, but his real subject is Brazil, "a country capable of advancing 50 years in only five of full democracy", as it lurches out of the developing world * Guardian *
A whodunnit and coming-of-age set in small-town Brazil ...a remarkable debut * Financial Times *
Affirms that crime fiction is to the twenty-first century what the grand social novel was to the nineteenth. Sadistic sexual politics, investigated by an unlikely trio of sleuths (two schoolboys and an elderly man); misogynistic murder, syncretic Christianity; municipal shenanigans, all fester beneath the raging Rio sun * The Tablet *
Edney Silvestre makes innocence and reality collide in a look at the history of Brazil as the scene of crime and perversion Folha de S. Paulo * Folha de S. Paulo *

Author Bio

Edney Silvestre is a Brazilian writer and journalist whose work as a TV reporter has taken him to Iraq and to the September 11 attacks in New York. He currently presents a popular TV book programme and lives in Rio de Janeiro. IF I CLOSE MY EYES NOW, a best seller in Brazil, is his first novel. His second novel, HAPPINESS IS EASY, will soon be available in Doubleday hardback and ebook