City of God - by Paulo Lins (Paperback)

About the Book

Now available in English for the first time, "City of God" is the searing novel upon which the acclaimed hit film was based.

Book Synopsis

The searing novel on which the internationally acclaimed hit film was based, City of God is a gritty, gorgeous tour de force from one of Brazil's most notorious slums. Cidade de Deus: a place where the streets are awash with narcotics, where violence can erupt at any moment over drugs, money, and love--but also a place where the samba beat rocks till dawn, where the women are the most beautiful on earth, and where one young man wants to escape his background and become a photographer. When City of God erupted on screens worldwide, it became one of the most critically and commercially successful foreign films of recent years. But few were aware of the story behind the film. Written by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the favela (shantytown) Cidade de Deus in Rio e Janeiro and who spent years researching its gang history, City of God began life as a coruscating, harrowing novelistic account of twenty years in the illicit pursuits of the youth gangs born from the favela. Now available in English for the first time, City of God is a raw, powerful portrait of the countless millions of poor people all over the world.

Review Quotes

Praise for City of God

"A Scarface-like urban epic, bursting with encyclopedic, graphic descriptions of violence, punctuated with lyricism and longing." -Publishers Weekly

"Lins, himself a survivor of the City of God, has a knack for making vignettes of such unremitting desperation remarkably lyrical." --Library Journal

"What non-Portuguese speaking folks may not know is that Fernando Mereilles and Katia Lund's epic film was adapted from an equally epic novel by Paulo Lins... City of God the novel should definitely be read as a work in its own right." --The Fader

"Raw, brutal, and graphically violent, City of God, by Paolo Lins, is a multifaceted story about hellish life and early death in a Brazilian slum, where family ties can be severed as easily as a kite string." --Lylah M. Alphonse, The Boston Globe

"Paulo Lins is shaking up the Brazilian literary market with City of God.... In the hands of Paulo Lins, the City of God transforms into a metaphor for hell, described with the sensibility of a poet. A vertiginous novel whose reportage explodes in the reader's face as gusts of words, disturbing and inflaming the conscience." --Correio Braziliense

"A book-length beating... [that] deserves to be remembered as an event... A momentum that will rivet the reader until the end... Intensely visual in the style of an action film. The deliberate and insolent insistence of the lyrical tone... gives the novel a distinctive streak of resistance, of refusal, that is difficult to imagine in a writer less resolutely nonconformist." --Foha de Sao Paulo

"City of God is a delirious book... [with] lyrical peaks, and the velocity of a gunshot." --Veja

"Compared to the film's aesthetic, which has been compared to that of Tarantino, Lins's novel is throughout a story almost journalistic in nature, one that could have been written by Kapuscinski or by the Truman Capote of In Cold Blood." --Richard Ruiz Garzóoacute;n, La Razón(Spain)

"Just as the conquerors invented a language to describe an undiscovered landscape and to make it their own, Lins conquers with words the subworld of the favelas-frightening, maddening, claustrophobic, in reality only imaginable in fantastic terms. City of God is an irreproachable and necessary work, an impressive immersion in the dominions of Mr. Hyde." --Javier Aparicio Maydeu, El Pa's (Spain)

"Heartbreaking... The routineness of death, its stutters and repetitions, are the success of the book, even if they do not make for easy reading." --Gilles Lapouge, La Quinzaine Littraire(France)

"The novel recounts several years in the life of the City of God . . . ending in a terrible gang war worthy of a Scorsese film. Eye-opening." --Guy Duplat, La Libre Belgique (Belgium)