E se eu gostasse muito de morrer

The novel starts out from a bizarre question, based on a real case: what kind of place is it where even the gravedigger takes his own life?

We follow a young narrator who carries a terrible secret from Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa, in the shape of a hand grenade that “witnessed” the biggest massacre ever perpetrated. The boy lives deep in the Portuguese countryside, which is the same everywhere, but now he can talk to the rest of the world via the Internet. The boy goes on an intimate, violent and very comic journey through one of the biggest statistical and psychological mysteries in Europe: the astonishing suicide rate in the Alentejo, the largest region of southern Portugal.

According to António Lobo Antunes this is “one of the best debut novels written in Portugal in the last years”.