Low Tide Season

Forty-four days of expired vacation. One email from HR. And a best friend who had already bought the tickets.

Yasmin is twenty-eight, with a job title nobody understands at family dinners and three months of a breakup that left her distrusting everything she feels.

When she found out he was cheating, the worst part wasn't the cheating. It was realizing she had spent two years beside someone and seen absolutely nothing. If her perception failed there - in the most obvious place in her life - where else is it failing?

Thirty days in Bahia begin at an electronic music festival on New Year's Eve, where she meets a Frenchman who reminds her she has a body. Then comes the crash. Then comes an island with no cars, where the silence is so large she finally hears her own exhaustion.

And then there is Analua - who has blue eyes, an entire life that does not revolve around Yasmin, and the patience of someone who learned not to promise what she cannot deliver.

Between a highway with no cell signal, a humiliating surf lesson, a serious fight with her best friend, and a goodbye that leaves important things unsaid, Yasmin discovers that a vacation doesn't fix a life - but it does reveal, with almost embarrassing clarity, exactly what needs to change.

For anyone who has ever felt they were functioning very well and living very little.

• Set in real places along the Bahian coast: Pratigi, Boipeba, Itacaré


• A sapphic love story with no tragedy, no spectacle, and no moral lesson


• 25 short chapters - a weekend read


• Dual-language author: originally written in Portuguese, translated by the author

"It wasn't transformation. It was the beginning of maintenance, which is less beautiful and lasts longer."