PinT Book Club 22nd session

Welcome to the 22nd meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss The Tokyo Suite by Brazilian author Giovana Madalosso, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato, who will join us for the session. The English translation was published in 2025 by Europa Editions. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese). See interpretation details below.

To ensure we can pay our collaborators without relying solely on external funding, we are now charging a £6.00 attendance fee per session. You’ll receive a full refund if you cancel up to 24 hours before the session. We hope this fee is affordable for everyone; however, if your circumstances don’t allow you to pay it, please contact us via our website.

Doors will open at 18.50, so we can start promptly at 19.00h. Nearer the time, we'll send you the Zoom link via email.

About the book

A powerful domestic thriller about motherhood and class tensions

A good nanny is hard to find. Fernanda, a busy executive whose marriage is foundering, has a room in her sprawling house redecorated in the style of a tiny luxury hotel room, the Tokyo Suite, to entice her maid Maju to stay.

Still, one morning, Maju walks out the door, slips past the army of nannies in the square, gets into a taxi, and vanishes. She also takes Fernanda’s daughter Cora with her.

Consumed by her own personal and professional crises Fernanda doesn’t realize at first that Cora is missing, and that Maju has kidnapped her, but when she does, she is violently pulled back into reality and the vagaries of her domestic life.

Meanwhile, Maju with Cora in tow, stops in cheap motels and abandoned locales as she makes her way across the Brazilian countryside, carrying out her plan, which will quickly and brutally veer out of control.

Madalosso sets in motion the lives of characters endlessly searching for something—affection, redemption, sex—to free them. Cora’s disappearance puts the past and the present on a collision course, and ignites desires, resentments, and class tensions. The desperate quest that ensues is a settling of scores with life and the expectations we create for ourselves.

Giovana Madalosso is an award-winning Brazilian writer and journalist. The Tokyo Suite is the first of her novels to be published in English.

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University, an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, and a BA in Literature from Bennington College. Born and raised in Natal, Brazil, she is an incoming Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Grinnell College.

Praise for THE TOKYO SUITE:

"Sharp and smoky, to be inhaled rather than binged, it's a novel for the working woman, in every sense of that redundant phrase."

— The New York Times

"An exploration of motherhood in all its various guises, highlighting the idealized image of being in that role and recognising the challenges, doubts, internal conflict and contradictions inherent in this experience."

— Swirl and Thread 

"Madalosso’s style is modern, fractured, vivid in its devotion to inner fears and fantasies yet open-ended... An atmospheric, idiosyncratic glimpse of contemporary female lives."

— Kirkus Reviews

"Giovana Madalosso follows in the path of Rachel Cusk and Olga Tokarczuk, taking her characters to the brink with brutal honesty."

— Suplemento Pernambuco

"A bitter and loving, eviscerating, suspenseful, and tender psychological novel about class, gender, motherhood, and nature both within and without."

— Booklist