Published in 2025
236 pages
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Eliana Alves Cruz is a writer and journalist. Her debut novel, Água de Barrela, won the Oliveira Silveira award, from Fundação Palmares, in 2015. She is also the author of O crime do cais do Valongo, Nada digo de ti, que em ti não Veja, and A vestida: contos, which won the Jabuti Award for Best Short Story.
What is this book about?
From award-winning Brazilian author Eliana Alves Cruz comes a raw, propulsive novel-in-translation about a mother and daughter who work as live-in maids for the rich, and the tragedy they unwittingly bear witness to.
Eunice works for a rich family in a building called The Golden Plate, in an unnamed city in contemporary Brazil. She lives with her daughter Mabel in a small room assigned to them. Eunice does the best that she can, though with a child and ailing mother both dependent solely on her, Eunice’s life is a series of limitations. As Mabel grows up, her dissatisfaction with the forced smallness of their world becomes difficult to bear, and she is driven to work towards new possibilities for herself. But when tragedy strikes, and a little boy dies, both women must decide whether to speak out about the injustices they have spent so long orbiting.
Told in direct, agile and evocative prose, Solitaria is a liberation novel of the most rousing order. Through the book’s examination of spaces and whose presence within them is permissible, the world of the Golden Plate unfurls, and an unflinching portrait emerges of modern-day Brazil, its legacies of colonial violence still haunting rooms, big and small, across the country.
