The substitute

Sometimes awareness strikes us like a lightning bolt, or a fatal blow. That is how this book may be said to have been born. The author says that, to this day, it is his favourite novel. Or at least the one that tries hardest to answer personal questions:

a) How do you deal with loss? 
b) How do you survive chaos?
c) Does love save us, yes, but to what extent—a great deal or only a little?
d) In the era of casual sex, what exactly is the value of physical love?
e) When we are in freefall, is redemption possible?

Are there answers given in the book? Are there possible answers? Only the reader can say.

One warning, however, is in order: this book is NOT about football. It is a book about people and the degree of humanity that dwells within them. Or not.

Hard-hitting material. Serious writing. By Rui Zink.

Rui Zink, born in Lisbon in 1961, is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Portuguese literature. A writer, teacher, and intellectual provocateur, he has created a body of work marked by irony, social criticism, and a rare ability to transform everyday life into revealing absurdity.

In books such as O Destino Turístico, A Instalação do medo, and Hotel Lusitano, he explores the tension between fantasy and reality: humour as a sharp form of thought.