Heliopolis — James Scudamore

Man Booker Prize Nominee: A Latin American rags-to-riches story filled with “morbid humor and blistering social commentary” (Publishers Weekly).

Born in a São Paulo shantytown, Ludo has followed a remarkable trajectory from one side of the city's impermeable social divide to the other. Rescued and raised by a plutocrat, Ludo is now entrenched in the gated, guarded community of the super-rich.

At twenty-seven, Ludo works for a vacuous “communications company” that markets unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born and from which he escaped. To make matters more complicated, he has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend.

Now, Ludo's involvement in an ill-conceived supermarket launch aimed at the favela's desperately poor population risks embroiling him in a world of violence and brutality, in this incisive novel that is by turns darkly humorous and deeply poignant.

“A triumph.” -- New Statesman