Rebellion is Portuguese literary celebrity Cristina Carvalho’s international debut. Born a rebel, Lena escapes her provincial existence and heads for Lisbon as a young woman to make a more exciting life for herself. Once there, however, she makes a series of fateful decisions--spending a night in a brothel, embarking on a marriage she lives to regret, longing instead for the blue-eyed man of her dreams.
The timeless, anchorless, startling, and entirely credible narrative voice of Cristina Carvalho’s extraordinary novel lays bare the intimate difficulties of Lena’s life, first at her parents’ boarding house and then, later on, with her husband and their son in the city. No matter where we live, every one of us knows a woman like Lena, but few of us have ever found ourselves right inside Lena’s mind before—not in fiction, not in any language.

Cristina Carvalho was born in Lisbon in 1949, female, an inhabitant of planet Earth and, as it turned out, a writer. Her fictional biography, O Olhar e a Alma - Romance de Modigliani (Planeta, 2015) won the Portuguese Society of Authors’ 2016 Prize for best novel and is published in French as Modigliani by Linda Leith Éditions (2018). Rebellion, her most recent novel, is the first of Carvalho’s books to ever appear in English.

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A strange and strangely captivating book. More than simply a story with beginning, middle and end, this is a book that seems to trace the lines of two lives—what is and what could be.