São Paulo, Brazil: 1954. A monkey, escaping the destruction of its native rain forest, runs into Veronica Segall's living room as she crushes her hand in the kitchen door à la Saint Veronica. A hat, a social climber manufactured in Peru but with pretenses to Paris, watches disapprovingly from his box. A gun, lying in a drawer unoiled and long forgotten, snaps to attention. And a man, an Englishman, one Henry Baxter, engineer, bridge-builder, and melancholic composer of unsent postcards, discovers Veronica and her voice in a coffee shop as he chews an elephant ear pastry.

As the story unfolds, monkeys mourn, hats remember, guns regret, and Veronica's voice invades Henry's ears. The voice—perhaps the voice of loss, perhaps the voice of God—itself becomes a character, mourning and desiring every bit as much as the characters it possesses.

V is based on a story legendary in the author's family about their mysterious Brazilian relatives and their lives in a post-war São Paulo Jewish community. Like most family myths, the story changes every time it is told. In Fink's deft hands, this myth is transformed into a story of the human will to survive, and the equally compelling (and fatally human) impulse toward self-destruction.

Read an excerpt from V.

Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Burn and co-editor of Performing Hybridity. She is a professor at Georgetown University, and the Founder and Gorilla-in-Chief of The Gorilla Press. She lives in a farmhouse in upstate New York.

Read
On Brazil, Bubbemeisers, and Being God:
Steve Almond Interviews Jennifer Natalya Fink

Read more about Jennifer Natalya Fink's first novel Burn.

Visit the Jennifer Natalya Fink webpage.