In August 1939, a brilliant, privileged twenty-seven-year-old American ethnologist commits suicide in Brazil, leaving behind seven letters suggesting different motives. To some he said he had contracted a terrible disease; to others he claimed he could not recover from his wife's affair with his brother (though he was neither married, nor had a brother). Intrigued by the mystery, our narrator gathers the fragmentary evidence and sets out to discover the truth, becoming obsessed, before long, with the idea that there was an eighth letter.

Slipping between fact and fiction, reality and illusion, this striking and haunting novel by one of Brazil's most remarkable contemporary writers follwos one man's personal quest for certainty - a mission that slowly drives him mad; a Marlowe haunted by the fate of his own Kurtz.