Rio de Janeiro, the 1970s. One hot Brazilian summer, Camilo meets Cosme and the two teenage boys discover a new kind of tenderness. But an act of violence will shatter their intimate world, and change the trajectory of their young lives. At once an incisive exploration of Brazilian society and a tender account of first love, first grief and revenge, The Love of Singular Men is a powerful and exhilarating novel, which sparkles with wit and playful ingenuity throughout.
"When you read something genuinely new it's hard to describe it - you end up settling for comparisons - and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It's ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind." --Zadie Smith
‘Inventive, surprising and unsparing, The Love of Singular Men is just so unusually vivid. It’s an unforgettable book, as sad as it is beautiful, as full of love as it is tragic.’ --Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move and Sweet Home
‘The Love of Singular Men is an electrifying, passionate piece of writing - unlike anything I’ve read. Most novels are, at base, very responsible pieces of work. Not headstrong or wayward. They don’t allow themselves the excursions and incoherences that life is full of. But Victor Heringer’s writing manages to pull off the miraculous feat of simultaneously playing constant truant to itself and being entirely present and focussed, first line to last. I don’t know how this was achieved (and also in this fantastic translation by James Young), but I’m very glad it was. What a loss. What a book.’ --Toby Litt, author of A Writer’s Diary and Patience
