Via Ápia - Paperback

by Geovani Martins (Author), Julia Sanches (Translator)

From one of Brazil's most acclaimed new literary stars, a twenty-first-century epic set in Rio's largest favela.

Life on the morro, the hill, is good. Five young people--the brothers Washington and Wesley and their friends Douglas, Murilo, and Biel--live close to Rocinha's main avenue, Via Ápia, just a quick bus ride from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro.

But the rhythms of their lives stutter and scratch when Brazil's militarized police storm Rocinha as part of "pacification" efforts ahead of the upcoming World Cup and an influx of international tourists. Via Ápia charts the expectant anxiousness before the police's invasion, the chaos born from their occupation of the hill, and the aftermath of their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year.

Told in heated bursts and marked by the charged chronology of the protagonists' lives, Geovani Martins's prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of turbulent unrest. Like the boom boom kat of Brazilian funk, the unbridled ambitions and resolute friendships of these characters blare throughout Via Ápia, delivering a resonant counternarrative to the notion that violent interventions are the state's only remedy to the afflictions of crime and poverty. The favela retorts: life, life is the answer.

Author Biography

Geovani Martins was born in 1991 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is the author of The Sun on My Head, named one of the Best Brazilian Books of the Century by Folha de São Paulo. He grew up with his mother in the Rio neighborhood of Vidigal. He supported his writing by working as a sandwich- board man and selling drinks on the beach, and was discovered during creative writing workshops at FLUP, the literary festival of the Rio favelas. Via Ápia is his first novel.

Julia Sanches translates works from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Her translations include Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim Award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators' collective, and she lives in Providence, Rhode Island.