The great Brazilian novelist’s comic masterpiece-published in a new translation for the centennial of Jorge Amado’s birth.

Here is the story of Joaquim Soares da Cunha, a Falstaff-like character who abandons his life of upstanding citizenship to assume the identity of Quincas Water-Bray, king of the Bahia lowlife and a ‘champion drunk.’ After a decade of revelry among bums, pimps, and prostitutes, he drops dead, and his prim family gathers for a proper burial. But when Quincas’s unsavoury friends show up with a bottle of rum, they whisk him along on a post-mortem journey to enjoy one last party-his own wake.

‘Raucous … rowdy … outradeous!’ The New York Times

‘Swift, funny, and occasionally even slapstick.’ Rivka Galchen, from the Introduction