'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' Colm Tóibín
'She suddenly leaned toward the mirror and sought the loveliest way to see herself'
Lucrécia Neves is vain, unreflective, insolently superficial, almost mute. She may have no inner life at all. As she morphs from small-town girl to worldly wife of a rich man, and her small home town surrenders to the forces of progress, Lucrécia seeks perfection: to be an object, serene, smooth, beyond the burden of words or even thought itself. A book that obsessed its author, The Besieged City is unlike any other work in Lispector's canon: a story of transformation, of what it means to see and to be seen.
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Gra¿Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.
