AustLit

'In the chaotic, steamy and self-interested city of Rio, you have just eight hours to live. Your name is Sé.

'Nineteen, fatherless, and an accidental soap star on one of Brazil’s most popular novellas, you return home from a soul-searching mission to discover that your virgin girlfriend is pregnant with God’s child. But that’s just the start of your problems.

'Between held at gunpoint by a senile old woman desperate to talk to anyone, accidentally holding up a bus, being dragged into a drug deal, and being followed by a band of shadowy assassins who might or might not like your t-shirt, you must negotiate the absurdities of tourists, evangelists, voyeurs, madmen and Vereadors to delay, or at least understand, your (inevitable?) death on a beach.

'A Short Death was shortlisted for the Australian/ Vogel's Literary Award 2011, where it was described by the chief literary critic of the Australian as being "a novel of such experimental brio and exotic locale... [it is] fantastic without relinquishing its visceral reality. The wonder is that a fiction this hard-boiled could sustain its humanity and flashes of transcendence."

'It is an existentialist pistol-shot to the head, where random vendettas, ecstasy heists, religious communion and mistaken identities collide to present an exquisitely absurd outer world, leaving half-finished the lost soul who searches for meaning in chaos.'

Source : publisher's blurb