The Brazilian author Victor Heringer produced a varied body of work before bringing his life to an abrupt, dramatic end in March 2018, three weeks before his thirtieth birthday. He left behind an acclaimed collection of poems, the prize-winning novel Glória, a sizeable number of essays and travel pieces, a set of short stories originally written for the online literary magazine Pessoa, and aural and video installations too. He was fluent in several languages. His last published book was a translation into Portuguese of the memoir First They Killed My Father by the Cambodian Loung Ung. Yet his finest achievement is the novel The Love of Singular Men, which came out in 2016 and has now been lovingly translated into English by James Young, who spent several years in Brazil and knows the places about which Heringer writes so piercingly. 

Camilo, the wide-ranging narrator, is a man in his fifties who has been crippled since birth. He observes of his arrival, with his characteristic bleak humour:

I’ve always believed I didn’t come into this world to be, but to have been, to have done. I was born posthumously. I was stillborn