Paulo Scott

The history of walls – as a way to keep people in or out – is also the history of people managing to get around, over and under them. From the Berlin Wall and the Mexico–US border, to the barbed wire fences of Bangladesh’s refugee camps, the short stories in this anthology explore the barriers that have sought to divide communities and nations, and their traumatic effects on people’s lives and histories. At a time when more walls are being built than are being brought down, All Walls Collapse brings together writing from across national, ethnic and linguistic borders, challenging the political impulse to separate and segregate, and celebrating the role of literature in traversing division.

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize Winner of the 2023 Jabuti Prize in the Brazilian Book Published Abroad category Federico and Lourenco are brothers. Their father is black, a famed forensic pathologist for the police; their mother is white. Federico - distant, angry, analytical - has light skin, which means he's always been able to avoid the worst of the racism that Brazilian culture has to offer. He can 'pass' as white, and yet, because of this, he has devoted his life to racial justice. Lourenco, on the other hand, is dark-skinned, easy-going, and well-liked in the brothers' hometown of Porto Alegre - and has become a father himself. As Federico's fiftieth birthday looms, he joins a governmental committee in the capital. It is tasked with quelling the increasingly violent student protests rocking Brazil by overseeing the design of a software program that will adjudicate the degree to which each university applicant is sufficiently black to warrant admittance under new affirmative-action quotas. Before he can come to grips with his feelings about this initiative, not to mention a budding romance with one of his committee colleagues, Federico is called home: his niece has just been arrested at a protest carrying a concealed gun. And not just any gun. A stolen police service revolver that Federico and Lourenco hid for a friend decades before. A gun used in a killing. Paulo Scott here probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than didactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret as much as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething masterpiece of rage and reconciliation.

Driving home, law student Paulo passes a figure at the side of the road. The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family's roadside camp. With sudden shifts in the characters' lives, this novel takes in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the worlds of Sao Paulo's rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians along Brazil's highways. One man escapes into an immigrant squatter's life in London, while another's performance activism leads to unexpected fame on Youtube. Written from the gut, it is a raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a home.