Solitaria

A Novel

De: Eliana Alves Cruz, Benjamin Brooks

Narrado por: Madeleine Claude

The first work of translation on the Alchemy list: a raw, propulsive novel about a mother and daughter who work as live-in maids for the rich, and the tragedy they unwittingly bear witness to.

Mabel has been staying in the Golden Plate—the most expensive building on the block, in an unnamed city in Brazil—for almost her entire life. Yet her presence there is merely tolerated: she inhabits a miniscule room with her mother, Eunice, who alongside Mabel provides round-the-clock attention and care for the wealthy family who lives there. As Mabel grows up, her dissatisfaction with the forced smallness of her life becomes difficult to bear, and she is driven to work towards new possibilities for herself.

Eunice does the best that she can—uneducated, and with a daughter and ailing mother both depending solely on her, her life is a series of limitations. She moves through the rooms of the penthouse suite in silent servitude, and though Mabel is ashamed of this invisibility act they've both perfected, the era of slavery is still fresh in the country's consciousness, and Eunice thinks it best not to dwell too hard on such things. But when tragedy strikes, and a little boy dies, Eunice must decide if she can face the indifference and injustices of the ruling class she has spent so long orbiting.

Told through direct, agile and evocative prose, Solitaria is a liberation novel of the most rousing order. Through the book's awareness of space and whose presence is permissible, the world of the Golden Plate unfurls, and an unflinching portrait emerges of modern-day Brazil, its legacies of colonial violence haunting rooms across the country, both big and small.

©2025 Eliana Alves Cruz (P)2025 Knopf Canada

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Solitaria is a gem. The novel’s clean and elegant architecture—life organized and thwarted across a series of rooms—reveals the intimate experience of power and powerlessness. The social hierarchy of the racial order is articulated subtlety in the spatial arrangements of servitude, all the little hidden rooms that sustain and support the world. The mother-daughter dyad at the center of the story details the intergenerational domination characteristic of the lives of those deemed disposable and at the same time offers the promise of breaking that hold and refusing servitude. I love that the rooms speak.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

"Solitaria is a sharp, incisive book; one charged by precise and faithful insights about class, caste, and race, all beautifully woven within a coming-of-age tale that does not hide behind artifice or sentimentality. A work of deep quality, I absolutely loved reading it."—Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love

"Enthralling and deftly narrated, Solitaria reveals the perils and unseen captivity of lives lived inside the lives of others. The very people who are said to be “part of the family”—maids, nannies, doormen and their children—navigate the treacherous waters of their employers’ homes, where everything is breakable, including people. In the tiny spaces where their own humanity is meant to be hidden, the spectre of servitude weighs on mothers and fathers, while sons and daughters learn how to free themselves, along with their families and communities. The way Eliana Alves Cruz manages to conjure up entire lives in such a short book is astonishing—as is the implacable social undercurrent of this novel. An essential novel about class and filiation." —Catherine Leroux, author of The Future