There Were Many Horses

There Were Many Horses is a groundbreaking work of contemporary Brazilian literature now available in English for the first time.

It’s May 9, 2000, and São Paulo is teeming with life. As Luiz Ruffato describes the scenes around him on this one typical day, he deciphers every minute and second of a metropolis marked by diversity―a mosaic of people from all over Brazil and the world that defines São Paulo’s personality at the start of the twenty-first century. The city is more than just traffic jams, parks, and global financial maneuvering. It is alive, and every rat and dusty grocery truck informs its distinctive character.

Winner of the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Award and the APCA Award for best novel.

Born in 1961, in Cataguases, Brazil, Luiz Ruffato grew up in a poor migrant family. He worked, among other jobs, as a textile worker and a turner-mechanical, and he studied journalism. In 2001, his debut novel, There Were Many Horses, was praised for its vivid depiction of the urbanization of the author’s hometown, São Paulo. The book revolutionized Brazilian literature, winning critical acclaim and a number of prizes, including the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Award and the APCA Award for best novel. A jury of literary critics from the newspaper O Globo proclaimed the book, which has now been translated into German, Spanish, French, and Italian and published in Portugal, to be one of the ten best Brazilian books of recent decades.