Maria of the Sawed Pipes

A shot fired at point-blank range. Published in 2007, the book follows the escape of an unlikely couple: Maria and her partner in crime – through a Portugal that rarely appears on postcards. There is no fado or saudade here: there is gasoline, violence, sex, black humour. Maria, a contemporary anti-heroine, trades the quiet fate of many “Marias” for risk, excess and disorder. A literary pulp road movie in which the action never lets up and the language delights in flouting every convention. Over-the-top, ironic, provocative, it burns like a fuse and begs to be read aloud, with laughter. Too absurd to be taken seriously. Seriously? Have you really looked around?

Ricardo Adolfo (b. 1974) grew up in Lisbon, but has lived between Amsterdam and Tokyo, collecting geographies that colour his writing. He is a novelist, screenwriter and advertising copywriter, and in everything he does you can see the same impulse: to provoke, to dismantle discourses, to expose the ridiculous where it is least expected. In cinema, we owe him "São Jorge". On television, we owe him "Sara". And when I say "we owe him", I mean it literally. We should make him a transfer to thank him.