The Tokyo Suite

"Sharp and smoky, to be inhaled rather than binged."--The New York Times A good nanny is hard to find. Fernanda, a busy executive whose marriage is foundering, has a room in her sprawling house redecorated in the style of a tiny luxury hotel room, the Tokyo Suite, to entice her maid Maju to stay.   Still, one morning, Maju walks out the door, slips past the army of nannies in the square, gets into a taxi, and vanishes. She also takes Fernanda’s daughter Cora with her.  Consumed by her own personal and professional crises Fernanda doesn’t realize at first that Cora is missing, and that Maju has kidnapped her, but when she does, she is violently pulled back into reality and the vagaries of her domestic life.   Meanwhile, Maju with Cora in tow, stops in cheap motels and abandoned locales as she makes her way across the Brazilian countryside, carrying out her plan, which will quickly and brutally veer out of control.   Madalosso sets in motion the lives of characters endlessly searching for something—affection, redemption, sex—to free them. Cora’s disappearance puts the past and the present on a collision course, and ignites desires, resentments, and class tensions. The desperate quest that ensues is a settling of scores with life and the expectations we create for ourselves.  

About the Author :
Giovana Madalosso is an award-winning Brazilian writer and journalist. The Tokyo Suite is the first of her novels to be published in English.  Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Other translations received the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic in the US, and Companhia das Letras/PRH in Brazil (in her own translation into Portuguese).

Review :
"Sharp and smoky, to be inhaled rather than binged, it's a novel for the working woman, in every sense of that redundant phrase." "The Tokyo Suite is a rich and compelling read." "An exploration of motherhood in all its various guises, highlighting the idealized image of being in that role and recognising the challenges, doubts, internal conflict and contradictions inherent in this experience." "Madalosso’s style is modern, fractured, vivid in its devotion to inner fears and fantasies yet open-ended... An atmospheric, idiosyncratic glimpse of contemporary female lives." "A bitter and loving, eviscerating, suspenseful, and tender psychological novel about class, gender, motherhood, and nature both within and without." “Giovana Madalosso picks at the wound left by slavery in Brazil.” “Giovana Madalosso follows in the path of Rachel Cusk and Olga Tokarczuk, taking her characters to the brink with brutal honesty.”