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Bom-Crioulo: The Good Black Man
‘Grim and profoundly subversive… the world’s first modern gay novel.’
Edward Lacey
‘Bom-Crioulo… a powerful, living character, one of Brazilian literature’s tragic heroes.’
Robert Howes
‘Too daring to be accepted, too brilliant to be forgiven, Caminha antagonized everyone who mattered, and his work — polemic, provocative, misunderstood — fell into an abyss of silence.’
Raul de Sá Barbosa
‘Bom-Crioulo remains not only readable, but enchantingly modern.’
João Trevisan
‘The first explicit gay novel in Brazilian literature… one of the first in modern Western literature.’
David William Foster
Classic Fiction

Bom-Crioulo

The Good Black Man
Adolfo Caminha
Translated by John Ryle
Introduction, glossary and maps
Forthcoming 2027

Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo: The Good Black Man, first published in Brazil in 1895, is an unprecedentedly frank account of an affair between a cabin-boy and an escaped slave conscripted into the Brazilian navy, now appearing in a new translation.

Set in the last decades of the nineteenth century and published a few years after the final abolition of slavery in Brazil, Bom-Crioulo is the first Brazilian novel to deal sympathetically with male homosexuality, and one of the first with a black protagonist.

The book is a long underrecognized classic of Brazilian naturalism, bringing to life the passions of the flesh, the ruthless discipline on board a naval corvette, and the moral confusion of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro — worlds haunted by the violence of slavery.

In its empathetic, non-judgmental presentation of a proscribed sexual relationship – interracial and intergenerational, Bom-Crioulo prefigures later works such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

About the author
Adolfo Ferreira Caminha, born in 1867, was a naval officer forced to resign his commission following a scandalous affair with an army officer’s wife. The author of a number of works of fiction and reportage, he died of tuberculosis in 1897 at the age of 29.