The beautiful and heartbreaking story of five-year-old Jeje, who discovered grief far too early.

This is a well-known coming-of-age novel that is a representative work of Vasconcelos, who is considered the best writer in Brazil, and has been translated and widely read in 21 countries around the world.
Through the sensitive five-year-old boy 'Jeje', the story gently discusses the problems of love, the primal conditions of human tragedy, the communication between humans and objects or nature, and the friendship between adults and children.


In the afterword, the translator talks about his memories of this book, which he copied into two volumes of college notebooks during his youth, a time filled with demonstrations and protests, out of the joy of translating such a clumsy but good work, and about the joy of going to Brazil, the country of Zeze, eating fruits such as lime oranges, tamarind, and goiabá (guava), and tasting Zeze's favorite 'dangling Maria' jelly, and then correcting the previous mistranslations and omissions to publish the first complete translation.
The book is beautifully illustrated and bound in hardcover.