From world-renowned Brazilian writer Chico Buarque comes a stylish, imaginative tale of love, loss, and longing, played out across multiple generations of one Brazilian family. At once jubilant and painfully nostalgic, playful and devastatingly urgent, Spilt Milk cements Chico Buarque’s reputation as a masterful storyteller.As Eulálio Assumpção lies dying in a Brazilian public hospital, his daughter and the attending nurses are treated—whether they like it or not—to his last, rambling monologue. Ribald, hectoring, and occasionally delusional, Eulálio reflects on his past, present, and future—on his privileged, plantation-owning family; his father’s philandering with beautiful French whores; his own half-hearted career as a weapons dealer; the eventual decline of the family fortune; and his passionate courtship of the wife who would later abandon him. As Eulálio wanders the sinuous twists and turns of his own...

An uproarious novel about a man's often sordid, lifelong search for his possibly imaginary half brotherIn 1960s São Paulo, teenage car thief and budding lothario Ciccio comes home each day to a house stuffed with books. His father, a scholar, cold and aloof, has spent his life acquiring them; his mother, by necessity, has spent her life organizing them. Ciccio himself feels like an afterthought in his own family, largely left to his own criminal devices. Though forbidden to touch any of the volumes in the library, Ciccio sneaks off with The Golden Bough one day only to discover a decades-old letter hidden inside the book, addressed to his father from a mysterious woman in Berlin. Ciccio becomes convinced that his father must have had an affair with this woman in the years before World War II—an affair that produced a son, a German brother who, real or imaginary, Ciccio becomes obsessed with tracking down. Thus begins a fractured coming-of-age...