Caffeine - Maurício Torres Assumpção

About the book:

What would you, a very rich person, do to escape justice for a crime you committed? What would you, very poor person, do to escape justice for a crime you didn't commit? A coffee baron and a young orphan take refuge, through the tricks of fate, in the effervescent and contradictory Paris of the Belle Époque. There, the paths of Baron de Lopes Carvalho and Sebastião Constantino do Rosário will cross, in a bitter and inevitable way. It is a great story narrated in our History, which, under the lights and shadows of the end of the 19th century, follows two unforgettable characters and two very different “Brazils”.

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Finalist for the 2019 Rio Literature Prize, Caffeína is the result of dedicated research into primary sources and the inventive recreation of facts and characters that marked the histories of Brazil and France. Maurício Torres Assumpção guides the reader through the surprising trajectories of these two characters while revealing the rise and decline of the Paraíba Valley, the reality of slavery, the last days of the monarchy and the first days of the Brazilian Republic, as well as the Paris of great enterprises , like the Eiffel Tower, of the miserable workers and the bohemian cafés and brothels of Montmartre.