Life under Brazil’s brutal “cordial racism” comes painfully alive in this novel of fathers and sons.

How do you become the protagonist of your own life? For Pedro, it means searching for himself in the objects his father left behind: the layers that make up his life, and that of his parents, and the circumstances, geographies, and wounds that shaped them all. It’s an archaeology of affections, but also of life in southern Brazil, where being black on the streets of Porto Alegre manifests violences large and small. Where being a young woman, raised by a single mother, may find you seeking security in the untrustworthy arms of men.

In Dark Side of Skin, Jeferson Tenório takes on fathers and sons, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the inescapable bonds and burdens of family and history in one delicately rendered, painfully precise account of loved ones lost and found.