An unrepeatable novel about the indelible mark that first love leaves on us

In the seventies, during the years of the military dictatorship, Camilo's family lives in a bourgeois villa that stands out in the middle of the Queím neighborhood, one of the poorest suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. The walls of the house are the thin line that separates a comfortable life, with service and a pool, from the most popular Brazil, the one of children playing football in the streets, surrounded by unhealthiness and crime. A line that begins to blur for Camilo one morning of the stifling summer when he turns thirteen, when his father unexpectedly brings home Cosme, a mulatto orphan of the same age whom the family takes in. The boy's arrival will shatter Camilo's peaceful life, who together with him will discover the world of the street, camaraderie, and desire. Thirty years later, Camilo returns to Queím, still unable to overcome the tragic death of Cosme that same summer, under a scorching sun.

El amor de los hombres solitarios is the second and last novel that the Brazilian Victor Heringer published in his short life. It is a warm and poetic story that covers the vast range of emotions that accompany the discovery of life, passion, and pain. A work sometimes festive and sometimes raw, encompassing the intimate, the social, and the existential, zigzagging between the margins, in that ungraspable space that separates tenderness from the most absolute violence. An unrepeatable novel, characteristic of the talent of a unique author.

“A truly singular novel, ingenious in the manner of Cortázar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, fun like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it, one has the desire to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake his hand firmly, and congratulate him on the start of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is no longer here. He left behind this beautiful book.” Zadie Smith

“Heringer turns a story that could have been bleak into a celebration of life.” John Self, The Guardian