From one of Brazil`s foremost literary voices comes a gripping, visceral new novel about youth, power and the nature of manhood A man rises at 5 a.m. and leaves his home. He does not wake his wife or child to bid them goodbye. He starts his car - an SUV filled with survival gear - but does not drive to his friend`s house as planned. Instead, gliding through the sleeping streets of Porto Alegre, he is haunted by ghosts of himself: the fearless boy riding a battered stunt bike, the silent adolescent fascinated by violence, the obsessive young surgeon, the distant husband. As the dawn comes on and people slowly fill the streets, the man drives unthinkingly, inexorably, back to the old neighbourhood of his youth. What is pulling him back there? Perhaps the need to make something happen, perhaps just nostalgia. Or perhaps he is looking for absolution - from a crime he has carried in his heart for fifteen years.