Diorama

Inspired by a true crime story from 1980s Brazil, Diorama is an engrossing, gritty and adrenalin-fueled coming of age novel, marked by displacement and never-closing family wounds.

A family hunting trip in the Rio Grande do Sul pampas. A taxidermist restoring animals in a natural history museum. A state representative shot dead with a rifle in the return of Brazilian democracy. A romance that must be kept secret due to prejudice. These vivid scenes are only a few of those interwoven in this hugely engaging novel, Carol Bensimon's first since winning the best novel Jabuti award for O clube dos jardineiros de fumaça.

Told from the perspective of Cecília Matzenbacher, a taxidermist, Diorama twists and turns through an existence marked by a brutal crime. While the adult protagonist tries to keep up the life she remade in the United States, her childhood self takes the reader back to 1980s Porto Alegre, revealing, little by little, the intimate and political details that shocked Rio Grande do Sul. Adding to that, the various voices of witnesses and people involved in the crime weave a bittersweet universe of shattered relationships, secrets, and ever-watchful violence. In filmic prose, with a rock soundtrack and interspersed reflections about nature and the fractures we carry, Bensimon builds a moving family history in Diorama.