Mateus Silva is at a crossroads, but too paralyzed to change direction in a life that he no longer seems to control. Mateo sells the home to the first bidder: his wealthy neighbor from childhood, whose wife, Graça, enchanted Mateus as a young man. It was Graça’s beauty, paired with his father’s unfaithfulness, that broke up his family. But the woman he sees now bears little resemblance to the one he remembers, and you can’t move forward by revisiting the past. “A taut, uneasy book, haunted by green-haired women and childhood-glimpsed beauty, and filled with bittersweet melancholy.