There's No Point in Dying

""A thrill. Francisco Maciel's There's No Point in Dying shows real talent . . . exhilarating, polyphonic . . . This remarkably inventive and haunting novel blurs the line between reality and fantasy, challenging the reader to keep up and pay attention. It's a nightmare of a book, but it's my kind of nightmare.""--Luiza Sauma in The Telegraph ""Set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Maciel's alluring English-language debut strings together phantasmagoric vignettes . . . Maciel crafts powerful set pieces . . . It's an indelible depiction of a community on the brink of disaster.""--Publishers Weekly ""There's No Point in Dying is a harrowing novel in vignettes, a story of a community intent on survival through whatever means necessary.""--Foreword Reviews ""Intriguing . . . a surreal read which captures a sense of desperation and topics from climate change to samba.""--The Irish News ""Comedy and tragedy change places as quickly as the narrative point of view . . . What results is a wheeling, collective novel where lives bleed together, the distinction between pursued and pursuer blurs, and private and public crises eclipse each other by the sentence.""--Asymptote ""Reads like a scrapbook or family album of a Brazilian city, in this case Rio de Janeiro . . . There are episodes that flesh out Brazil's troubled past . . . And there are cautions about Brazil's precarious future.""--Southwest Review ""A novel in circles, the force of which hurls its characters toward the center, with an ever-increasing intensity, making them disappear and reappear, letting an aura of purity shine through. In the end, they all desire a lost innocence. It's neither a world of criminals nor victims, but of humans subjected to every misfortune.""--Rascunho, The Newspaper of Brazilian Literature