The Air You Breathe

Dorish, an awkward orphan, works in the kitchen of a sugar plantation estate in northern Brazil. She knows nothing besides the lord’s house and the surrounding fields of sugarcane. But one day a girl her own age appears in the house—the owner’s daughter, Grasa, beautiful, clever, and insolent. Dorish and Grasa, girls from different worlds, are bound by loneliness in a remote corner of Brazil, cut off from the rest of the world. Music lives inside each of them: one has a wondrous bird-like voice, and the other composes poems to the melodies that sound within her. And both dream of plunging into the big world. Music becomes their shared passion, the foundation of their friendship and rivalry, and the only way to escape the life they seem condemned to. The novel spans several decades and several settings: the Brazilian backwoods, sparkling lights of Rio de Janeiro, and Hollywood. Samba—boisterous and intimate, loud and barely audible—sounds from every page of this book.