2026 · Companhia das Letras
A clandestine love, the early internet, and what time reorganizes in memory.
Alexandre Vidal Porto's fifth novel, published by Companhia das Letras in July 2026.
View bookThe work
A middle-aged man tells a friend about a love affair he had in his youth with a married man, when he was working as a diplomat in New York.
The relationship began in an online chat room in the early days of the Internet, in the 1990s, and continued for decades, across different cities and in different forms, suspended between desire, guilt, and the impossibility of fulfillment. As he tells his story, the narrator reflects on how his understanding of that passion changed over the years.
The book confronts the boundaries between what we desire and what is possible. It explores the passions that leave indelible marks on us and continue to transform us even after they have ended. Although the story unfolds between two men, it transcends questions of gender: it could happen to anyone who falls in love.
The narrator speaks of memory and choices and reflects on relationships that we can only understand and make sense of after time has done its work. The story is a long attempt to understand the past, not in order to change it, but finally to accept it, because understanding what we have lived through can be liberating.
The language is direct, with chapters built from short, incisive sentences. It is a story to lose oneself in and read in a single sitting, wanting to reach the end while not wanting it to end. A book that makes no noise, yet remains.
About the book
Anyone who has never lived through an impossible love, the narrator of Alexandre Vidal Porto's novel argues, is at a disadvantage in life: there is much to learn from looking back at a relationship that might have been but, for many reasons, was not. Even if only after many years — sometimes decades — are we able to give the proper shape to what happened.