PinT Book Club 25th session

Welcome to the 25th meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss Three Stories of Forgetting by Portuguese author Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and translated by Alison Entrekin, who will join us for the session. The English translation was published in 2025 by Macmillan Publishers. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese). See interpretation details below.

Our session is exceptionally taking place on a Saturday at 12pm (GMT) so translator Alison Entrekin, who lives in Australia, can join us.

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

From the award-winning writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, a haunting exploration of the memories of three men and the reverberations of slavery, colonialism, and empire.

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Three men haunt these pages. Perhaps they are tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. All three have been expelled in some way, sent on solitary journeys into the night. Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes endlessly to his daughter, asking for her forgiveness. And Bruma, an enslaved man, initiates a young writer, Eça de Queirós, into the world of literature.

In discrete yet overlapping tales, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Three Stories of Forgetting explores the experiences of those who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire. In these unstable chapters, we find incarnations of our despair at the questions that history does not answer, and allegories that may yet reveal new ways of seeing through the dark.

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida was born in Luanda, Angola, and raised in Portugal. She is the author of acclaimed novels including That Hair, a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, and her work has won the Vergílio Ferreira Prize and the Oceanos Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta and Words Without Borders, among other publications.

Alison Entrekin is an award-winning Australian literary translator from the Portuguese. She has translated many of Brazil’s most beloved and iconic literary works, including Clarice Lispector’s 1943 debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, the favela classic City of God by Paulo Lins and José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree.

She currently teaches literary translation online and is working on a new translation of Grande Sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa, with support from Itaú Cultural and the Australia Council.

Praise for THREE STORIES OF FORGETTING:

“A brilliant, yet understated, critique of a past that Portugal most likely hopes to forget. Lyrical, enigmatic, and subtle: an accomplished work.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“A work of such unsettling precision . . . Pereira de Almeida’s willingness to go there . . . is what separates this from the well-intentioned but ultimately comfortable tradition of guilt-ridden colonial fiction.”

— Jordan Silversmith, Asymptote Journal

“One of the most important voices in Lusophone literature today, Almeida examines the ghosts of the Portuguese Empire through the eyes of men tormented by remorse and the spoils of war.”

— Brittle Paper

“A symphony of resistance.”

—Público (Portugal)

“Impressionistic . . . Poetic and precise.”

—Le Monde (France)

“Each of these three tales exerts a singular power of fascination . . . Magical.”

—Le Temps (Switzerland)