My German Brother

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...