Via Ápia: A Novel

by Geovani Martins, Julia Sanches (Translator)

Overview

From one of Brazil’s most acclaimed new literary stars, a twenty-first-century epic set in Rio’s largest favela.

Life on the morro, the hill, is good. Five young people—the brothers Washington and Wesley and their friends Douglas, Murilo, and Biel—live close to Rocinha’s main avenue, Via Ápia, just a quick bus ride from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro.

But the rhythms of their lives stutter and scratch when Brazil’s militarized police storm Rocinha as part of “pacification” efforts ahead of the upcoming World Cup and an influx of international tourists. Via Ápia charts the expectant anxiousness before the police’s invasion, the chaos born from their occupation of the hill, and the aftermath of their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year.

Told in heated bursts and marked by the charged chronology of the protagonists’ lives, Geovani Martins’s prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of turbulent unrest. Like the boom boom kat of Brazilian funk, the unbridled ambitions and resolute friendships of these characters blare throughout Via Ápia, delivering a resonant counternarrative to the notion that violent interventions are the state’s only remedy to the afflictions of crime and poverty. The favela retorts: life, life is the answer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374612986
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	07/01/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Geovani Martins was born in 1991 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is the author of The Sun on My Head, named one of the Best Brazilian Books of the Century by Folha de São Paulo. He grew up with his mother in the Rio neighborhood of Vidigal. He supported his writing by working as a sandwich- board man and selling drinks on the beach, and was discovered during creative writing workshops at FLUP, the literary festival of the Rio favelas. Via Ápia is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant. . . To read Via Ápia is to experience the rush of emotion that comes with encountering a story for the first time and feeling a deep sense of recognition, like it’s been there all along."

—Willem Marx, Electric Literature

"Through a focus on the local conditions, Martins indicts a country that treats its poor and Black citizens as a problem to be resolved by brutal 'pacification,' while still celebrating the lively, joyful pulse of life in Rocinha."

—Anna Mebel, Asymptote Journal

"Geovani Martins has written a funny, tender, kinetic, often brutal debut novel. Via Ápia cracks open a favela—built on a hill whose slope suggests both aspiration and danger—revealing a teeming, vivid motion that can only be found by observing real life without pity or fear. Martins's eye is sharp, his ear true. Julia Sanches's translation is hip and contemporary. This book is the beginning of something big."

—Vinson Cunningham, author of Great Expectations

"Via Ápia is absolutely alive with the rhythm of Rio, of youth, of community. With an incredible dexterity, Martins flows between characters who together make a wonderous novel of great heart and ambition."

―Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

"Vivid, electric, and so immersive you'll catch a contact high, Via Ápia pulls you into the wild world of Rocinha, the largest favela in Latin America, and never lets go. A celebration of life and all the beauty and pain that comes with it, Geovani Martins has transformed the novel into a portal to new sights, sensations, sounds, smells, and tastes—all of which initially seem foreign but are more familiar than we know. From alleyway confrontations to bumping bailes, Martins masterfully highlights the heart-wrenching conflict of a changing home full of people who are forced to change with it. An inner-city epic that will echo through the ages."

—Mateo Askaripour, author of This Great Hemisphere

"This is a war novel like no other, an unflinching portrayal of the militarized police occupation and 'clean-up' of Rio de Janeiro's Rocinha. And Julia Sanches handles afro-brasilidade, class, and favela slang with so much care and brilliance. I don't know how she did it. Her translation is sheer sorcery."

—Bruna Dantas Lobato, winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature and author of Blue Light Hours

"Geovani Martins documents the marvelous beauty and tragedy of lives on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro with the humor, perspicacity, and expansive detail of Machado de Assis. But check it: the thumping boiling heart of this book is the sick-ass incisive malandra narrative voice brought to crackling life by Julia Sanches’s wonderful translation. Via Ápia is about carving out a space for joy, love, and friendship in a death-haunted dangerous place. Martins imbues every corner of this book with grace and light; it’s that dazzling quality that cements Via Ápia as a contemporary Brazilian classic."

—Harold Rogers, author of Tropicália

"Readers will have a tough time putting this one down."

—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher