Saving the Fire

Moisés lives with his father, Mundinho, and his sister, Luzia, in Tapera do Paraguaçu, a rural village in Bahia. His other siblings have left, and their mother vanished. Tapera, what remains of it, is a community of farmers, fishermen, and potters of Afro-Indigenous origin, overlooked from on high by a forbidding seventeenth century monastery, from which the church still rules over all they survey. With their mother long vanished, Luzia provides what she can by way of care and affection for her brother, but the long hours she works at the monastery, and the whispers about her strange powers, limit her capacity and she dreams of a family reunited and of liberty, of freedom from decades of suffering and decades of secrets.


Epic and lyrical, with the power to both enchant and outrage the reader, Saving the Fire shows us that the ghosts of a family's past are often indistinguishable from the shadows of a nation. Masterfully, Itamar Vieira Junior blends the intimate journeys of his characters with faithfully rendered elements of Brazilian life. It's a story permeated by the spectre of colonialism, the scars of which still show, and still ache.