Chico Buarque - O Irmão Alemão

At age 22, Chico Buarque discovered he had a German brother.

Sergio Buarque de Holanda, a renowned historian and literary critic, Chico's father, lived in Germany between 1929 and 1930 as a newspaper correspondent. The vibrant Berlin of the 1930s served as the setting for a romance with a German woman, with whom he had a son he never met. His name was Sergio Ernst.

Almost five decades after the discovery, Chico Buarque decided to make the existence of this brother – and the silence surrounding him – the subject of his next novel. But first he needed to know exactly what had happened to him.

This novel was born from this search. Masterfully conducted by an obsessive, delirious, megalomaniacal, and profoundly lonely narrator who doesn't intend to be so, the narrative ensnares the reader in a plot where reality and reverie are permanently intertwined. At a certain point, the search for narrator and author becomes equally the reader's, who too is desperately searching for this unknown brother.