Born in a São Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation from one side of the city’s impermeable social divide to the other. Rescued and raised by a plutocrat, Zeno Generoso, Ludo finds himself entrenched in the gated, guarded community of the super-rich.
Now twenty-seven, Ludo works for a vacuous “communications company” that markets unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born and from which he escaped. To make matters more complicated, he has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend.
Ludo’s involvement in an ill-conceived supermarket launch aimed at the favela’s desperately poor population risks embroiling him in a world of violence and brutality. By turns darkly humorous and poignant, James Scudamore’s Booker Prize-nominated novel is a highly original, surprising take on the rags-to-riches story.
Scudamore is unafraid of exploring difficult subjects--the patronizing nature of so-called philanthropy, the discomfort of not belonging, the independence that charity takes away, the uncertainty of how to help another person without being insulting, who owes what to whom--and his writing is at its strongest when he offers no solutions to these social conflicts. Instead, he freely examines the raw feelings of shame, stifled anger, and apathy that plague his characters. Scudamore respects the complexities of the social dynamics and does not try to oversimplify these relationships... (Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
Shelf Awareness
Booker-nominated Heliopolis is a ravishing, sprawling Dickensian love story where super-rich collide with super-poor in a banquet of a book.
Booklist
[Scudamore] vividly portrays a city based on São Paulo, with its haves (living in a gated city) and its more populous have-nots, as he tells Ludo’s story in flashbacks and explores the issue of belonging...this pulses with the vibrance—and occasional violence—of city life.
Publishers Weekly
Issues of race and class spark a wily, layered, and savvy narrative where nods to Great Expectations coexist nicely with Scudamore's morbid humor and blistering social commentary.
Library Journal
The result is a richly detailed, beautifully executed work that should move readers deeply.
The Independent (UK)
Scudamore is a good enough writer that you want to read more, but it would have been nice to have had that 'more' right here.
The Guardian (UK)
James Scudamore again achieves something magical with the Booker-longlisted Heliopolis.
The Daily Telegraph (UK)
Scudamore has the superb novelist’s gift for giving vivid, sympathetic life to even second-string characters, as well as his main ones; and he also has the extraordinary power of summoning an entire brooding, smoggy city to life. Most of all, though, he has the ability to take on the heaviest of themes with the lightest and most compelling of touches, and leave you with an appetite for more.
Brazil's Favelas
In his novel Heliopolis, James Scudamore candidly describes the favelas of Brazil as poor shantytown communities; "from a distance, you can't imagine anyone living in such a place: the area has the chaotic texture of a landfill site, a rubbish dump… dense thickets of unofficial power lines; walls and roofs of remaindered breeze-block and stolen brick and found-iron sheeting and repurposed doors; structures that should never work but somehow do because they must". His descriptions are by no means exaggerated. Favelas are often populated by people who illegally occupy lands on the outskirts of Brazil's larger cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Homes are made from scrap materials and frequently lack electricity, running water, and proper sanitation, leading to increasing health problems as well.
The rampant expansion of favelas can be associated with the unequal distribution of wealth in Brazil. According to Oxfam, "Brazil is one of the most unequal nations in the world, although...
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities.
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