Chico Buarque, Budapest, 2003

José Costa is an unexpectedly successful ghostwriter with an increasingly less successful personal life, and after a stopover in Budapest he becomes curious about Magyar, the notoriously difficult Hungarian language. Flitting back and forth between Rio de Janeiro and Budapest, Costa sees his life fade out while the life of his alter-ego Zsoze Kósta, Hungarian ghostwriter, becomes ever more real... A dream-like novel about transition between personal realities, thoroughly marinated in a particularly Brazilian kind of dazzling, literary creativity.   PY

•  Budapest was shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.