Joana's

A book in the Failed Paternities trilogy. Published in 2013, this book confirms the uniqueness of Romão's writing: a rigorous prose, marked by a slow cadence and a tension that creeps into every sentence.

The text builds itself as a space of confrontation, where language becomes an instrument of emotional dissection. Reading it requires availability and attention, because what is at stake is not just a story, but a reflection on the limits of communication, intimacy, and the fragility that permeates human relationships. 

in Abysmo: "Joana and Jorge have been waiting for a child for eight years. They changed the color of the child's room three times: the anxiety was immense. That night, at seven months pregnant, when Joana's waters break, Jorge found himself thinking that perhaps there are evils that come for good and that this meant an easier birth. The drama explodes in the hospital when something goes wrong. Joana then asks the doctor to simulate a normality, beginning a long inner journey that takes her, the character, and us, readers, on a roller coaster ride to madness."

«Valério describes everything in minute detail, in a fast, elastic, comprehensive prose, made of panoramas and zooms, like a documentary that the National Geographic would make about us, humans, those primates who are ultimately so similar in their “deepest and most genuine drives.” There is talk, for example, of the primary “magnetism” that makes mothers drawn to their children's crying, following the instinct of “a properly calibrated female heart.” And it is here that the story begins its slide into an “existential high sea in which everything is stripped bare in the absence of solid ground.”»
José Mário Silva, Expresso, August 2013

«With a remarkable sense of detail, an original use of metaphor, and never losing the rhythm of the sentence and the flow, in a rugged score, between direct and indirect speech, meta-text and raw orality, in a galloping sequence, like the heart of a premature fetus on a CTG machine, the book opens with an extremely powerful salomonic scene, after the illustrations, also made with a scalpel by Alex Gozblau.»
Ana Margarida de Carvalho, Visão, September 2013

Valério Romão was born in 1974, in France, but lived much of his life in Portugal. He is a writer, translator, and playwright, recognized for his intense approach and exploration of the darkest areas of the human experience. Author of novels, plays, and short stories. Among his best-known books are Autism, O da Joana and Cair para Dentro. Valério Romão remains alive and active in the Portuguese literary scene, being considered one of the most unique voices in contemporary fiction.