O meu amigo pintor

Told as a diary, the book opens three days after Cláudio's closest friend has died — the Painter, a haunted, deeply melancholic artist Cláudio discovered dead one Tuesday after school. As Cláudio writes his way through the loss, he pieces together who the Painter really was: a man marked by political persecution under the military dictatorship, by an impossible love for a woman named Clarice, and by his own conviction that he had failed as an artist.

Lygia Bojunga Nunes builds an unusual friendship between a child dazzled by the Painter's canvases and a man who found, in that childlike wonder, a brief relief from his despair. Written for young readers but reaching well past them, the novel confronts suicide, loss, and political trauma with unflinching honesty and spare, sensitive prose.