“This grim and profoundly subversive novel”
EDWARD LACEY
“Nabokov’s Lolita meets Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room”
ROBERT JOHNSON
Forthcoming 2026
Bom Crioulo: The Good Black Man (1895) is a pioneering novel of love between an escaped black slave conscripted into the Brazilian navy and a white cabin-boy. Set in the last decades of the nineteenth century and published seven years after the final abolition of slavery in Brazil. It was the first Brazilian novel to deal sympathetically with homosexuality, and one of the first to have a black protagonist.
The author, Adolfo Caminha, born in 1867, was a former naval officer, forced to resign his commission following a scandalous affair with an army officer’s wife. Bom Crioulo appears in a new translation by John Ryle, with an introduction and glossary
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