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Synopsis
A father, close to death, reveals to his son the true story of his own father’s end. The mean old gaúcho was murdered by fellow villagers at a Sunday dance in Garopaba, a sleepy town on Brazil’s Southern Atlantic coast. It was a sort of execution, vigilante style. Or so the story goes.
The unnamed young man, who is an avid swimmer with no strong ties to home, strikes out for Garopaba without being quite sure why. He builds a simple life and tries to learn more about his grandfather, but information doesn’t come easily. A rare neurological condition means that he doesn’t recognize faces, leading to frequent awkwardness and occasional hostility. Life in Garopaba eventually becomes downright dangerous.
Atmospheric, languid and tense, Blood-Drenched Beard brings one of the greatest young Brazilian writers to the English-speaking world. Daniel Galera’s spare and powerful prose unfolds a story of discovery that builds with oceanic force.
Author bio
Daniel Galera was born in 1979 and lives with his wife and daughter in Porto Alegre. He has published several novels, including Blood-Drenched Beard (tr. Alison Entrekin), The Shape of Bones (tr. Alison Entrekin) and Twenty After Midnight (tr. Julia Sanches). A film adaptation of Blood-Drenched Beard by director Aly Murityba is slated for release in 2025.
Galera won the Machado de Assis Best Novel Award for Cordilheira (2008); Best New Writer in Comics in Brazil’s prestigious HQMIX Prize for the graphic novel Cachalote (2010), illustrated by Rafael Coutinho; and was selected by Granta magazine as one the Best Young Brazilian Writers in 2012.
Galera has translated numerous authors into Portuguese, including Cormac McCarthy, John Cheever, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, Jack London, David Mitchell, Chris Kraus and James Bridle.
Translator bio
Alison Entrekin is an Australian literary translator from the Portuguese. She has translated many of Brazil’s most beloved and iconic literary works into English, including Clarice Lispector’s 1943 debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, the favela classic City of God by Paulo Lins and José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree. Her work has received the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize & PEN medallion, the AAWP Translator’s Prize and an American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellowship. She has been a finalist in the PEN America Translation Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, among others. Her new translation of Grande Sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa is due for release in 2026.
Press quotes
“The writing can grow so lush one can feel the muscle-memory habits of life in a humid habitat returning -- the mosquito swat, the brow swipe.”
--John Freeman, Dallas Morning News
“Superstition, rumor and illusion filter into reality in a way reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez... The exciting, action-packed culmination to this impressive novel manages to reveal what happened to Gaudério without answering away the eerie mysteries that surround his story.”
--Wall Street Journal
“Entertaining... a low-key and often very funny existential noir with sand between its toes. At various moments, it put me in mind of the work of Roberto Bolaño, Jim Harrison, the Coen brothers and the Denis Johnson of his black comedy Already Dead (1997). It's a campfire story for sensitive, flip-flop-wearing, would-be tough guys.... [Blood-Drenched Beard] is seductive. It's got a tidal pull.”
--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Blood-Drenched Beard, Daniel Galera's exploration of family, is part mystery, part travelogue and part sociology steeped in magical realism. Translated from the Portuguese with grace and swing by Alison Entrekin, the novel plays along the Brazilian coastline, blending the geographical and the psychological. It is a journey into self, a narrative of rich characterization, startling detail and psychedelic sweep.’
--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Galera's keen sense of characters and unflinching depictions of the sometimes awkward desperation of coastal life ground the story and give it a gritty feel that is consistently satisfying.”
--Publishers Weekly
“[An] altogether impressive novel by a young writer only now becoming known outside Brazil... Galera here blends some of the wistfulness of Latin American magical realism with a brooding dystopianism.... An elegant, literate and literary mystery of appearances and disappearances.”
--Kirkus Reviews
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