Saudade
The Giramondo Publishing Company; Transit Books
& China Workers Publishing House
The Giramondo Publishing Company, Australia.
Order a copy here.
Shortlisted 2019 Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards
Shortlisted 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature
Finalist, 2020 Field Notes Tournament of Books (USA)
The long-awaited new work by the acclaimed author of the novel Homework.
A coming-of-age story set in Angola in the period leading up to the colony’s independence, Saudade focuses on a Goan immigrant family caught between complicity in Portuguese rule, and their dependence on the Angolans who are their servants. The title speaks to the melancholy longing for homeland that haunts the characters, and especially the young girl who is the book’s protagonist and narrator.
Suneeta Peres da Costa’s novella captures with intense lyricism the difficult relationship between the girl and her mother, and the ways in which their intimate world is shaken by domestic violence, the legacies of slavery and the end of empire. Her intellectual awakening unfolds into a growing awareness of the lies of colonialism, and the violent political ruptures that ultimately lead to her father’s death, and their exile.
"Peres da Costa weaves sadness and longing through the pages of this piercingly beautiful novella [...] the author combines scenes, dialogue, and narration in continuous and exhilarating prose", Sujatha Fernandes, Sydney Review of Books
"Saudade will leave you feeling lost and homesick for a place of your own. Peres Da Costa paints a vivid picture of a young girl’s internal world and shows us how precarious, damaging and lonely an othered existence can be. Saudade is a beautifully-written, enlightening read", Marisa Wikramanayake, Books & Publishing
"Saudade (‘melancholy’ in Portuguese) is a treasure of a novella, a vivid throaty shout in which settings and sounds and the physical world work tangibly together", Michalia Arathimos, Overland
"[T]he spare, wistful melancholy of the protagonist’s early memories, filtered through the lens of acquired understanding, carries just the right tone", Joseph Schreiber, Roughghosts
"Form and content match perfectly in Saudade [...] this sensitive, lyric novella gives us a stretch in the life of its protagonist, as she grows from infancy to young womanhood during a turbulent political epoch that impacts on self and family. The novella’s themes are [...] handled in a way that is always fresh and arresting [...] ‘Saudade’ [...] is a contradictory emotion, one that is bittersweet, of having but not holding, holding yet not having. As such, it is the perfect title for a work that makes a fascinating contribution to any body of writing with which one might like to associate it: Australian, Indian, Goan, Angolan . . . A strongly recommended read", Paul Melo e Castro, Interdisciplinary Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies
"Saudade makes actions as simple as looking in the mirror and singing to oneself both meaningful and pleasurable [...] delivers on two things that make reading exciting to me: experiencing something new or unexpected and reveling in the language that brought me there", Micco Carporale, Field Notes' Tournament of Books
"Suneeta Peres Da Costa has packed so much into this wonderful little novel [...] The way everything ties in with the title, the narrative and the interesting time period in which it takes place, the beautiful writing, they all come together to form a terrific little novel", Colin McGavin, Collinsbookblog
"Saudade is a memorable story for it wraps the reader in its wistfulness, its sadness, its pain and it is not easy to extricate oneself from it for days after", Jaya Batacharji Rose, Confessions of An Avid Bibliophile
"The short, yet powerfully evocative and imaginative, story is set in Portuguese Angola nearly five centuries after da Gama’s fateful voyage and follows a young girl, Maria, who was born in Angola to Goan parents. It charts her journey to adulthood and her search for belonging in a colonial nation on the cusp of collapse", Athena Rogers, Right Now
"Saudade is a lyrical, bold evocation of childhood, enlivened by unforced flourishes of magical realism, that plays intricately on layers of awareness and awakening, on the notion of homecoming, and on complicity in injustice", Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald
"The book is vanishingly short – I finished it in just a few hours – but the art involved in the telling is rich and deep [...] The author is sure of her artistic vision and the way the stories emerge is perfect and absorbing. This is a wonderful book that can claim some relationship with the magical realism of the second half of the 20th century", Matthew da Silva, Happy Antipodean
"Peres da Costa [...] is alive to the palimpsestic writing over of colonial sites and their histories [...] Saudade can be read as an alternative route towards understanding the untranslatable sadness of a lost empire", Anna MacDonald, Splice
"[Saudade] opens up a liberatory, discursive space for negotiating new subject positions and granting agency and voice [...] to the figure of the migrant", Khaoula Chakour, South Asian Review
"Saudade is notable for the gorgeous fluency of its prose style. Its moving story is told with an elegance and concision that exemplify the virtues of the novella form"
~ from the Judges' Comments,
2019 Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
"What I most love about Saudade is the narrator’s extraordinary ability to empathise with those who surround her [...] I would find myself grieving for the characters (or perhaps grieving for myself – for I too am a child of a colonial past), for the book truly did bring me to a state of Saudade – ‘a lostness, a feeling of not having a place in the world'"
Read an interview about Saudade here.
Copyright © 2024 Suneeta Peres da Costa