2023 National Book Award Finalists

"Claudia seeks the attention of her melancholic mother, also named Claudia, who occupies her days reading gossip magazines and tending to the family's teeming collection of house plants in their Cali, Colombia, apartment. The mother is particularly obsessed with the deaths of famous women such as actor Natalie Wood, who died in 1981, and tells the narrator they took their own lives to escape from domineering men. The older Claudia married the narrator's...

"A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it over fifty years ago from his youthful passion, handsome Caicero. But having grown up in an impoverished area of Brazil where the demands of manual labor thwarted his becoming literate, Raimundo haslong been unable to read. As young men, he and Caicero fell in love, only to have Raimundo's father brutally beat his son when he discovered their affair. Even after Raimundo succeeds in making a life...