Never-Ending Youth is, in the words of writer/translator Eric A. Gordon, who contextualizes the book in his foreword, “a New World Bildungsroman in which a clutch of hungry and ambitious friends and comrades make the best of an untenable situation and survive to see better times.” Urariano Mota’s novel portrays the existential challenges confronting young people with passionate convictions at a time of class warfare and political upheaval in a continent-sized country which has been the staunchest South American ally and admirer of the United States since World War II. The book is a poignant and disturbing chronicle of our times.

Peter Lownds explains how and why he translated a recent Brazilian novel