The Face on the Band - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

For sixty years her face crossed the world on the band of a cigar — a woman in a red dress, gazing at a sea that never existed.

In 1964, in a small tobacco town in the Brazilian Recôncavo, a market poet named Aurélio is hired to write the ballad for a new cigar. He is also, quietly and hopelessly, in love with Benedita, the washerwoman three doors down — a woman with cracked hands, a crooked tooth, and a laugh too big for the yard. So he does the only thing his cowardice allows: he rhymes her away. He gives her a red dress she never owned, a queen's neck, a sea she will never see, and sells the beautiful lie to the factory. Her invented face travels to forty-two countries. The real woman keeps washing linen, three doors away, until she dies.

Sixty years later, a letter arrives on expensive paper. The company — now owned by a faceless fund and advised by a consultancy with an English word for everything — intends to erase her image for something "cleaner, more timeless." A young consultant is sent to manage the old poet's quiet exit. What she finds instead is the truth he buried, and the last, bravest thing he will ever write.

Tender, savage, and quietly funny, The Face on the Band is a novel about the only immortality that matters — being truly seen, once, by one person — and about everything the world will sell you instead.

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