Angélica Lopes

Angélica Lopes is a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist from Rio de Janeiro with over twenty years of experience in writing fiction. Her dramatic vein came from writing Brazilian soap operas, known worldwide for attracting millions of viewers daily.
She is also an award-winning author of YA novels and has written scripts for cinema, TV series, and comedy shows. THE CURSE OF THE FLORES WOMEN is her first adult novel.
THE CURSE OF THE FLORES WOMEN [A MALDIÇÃO DAS FLORES]
In recent years, in Rio de Janeiro, a lace veil hiding a secret coded story comes into the hands of Alice, a young feminist, telling a tale of domestic violence that happened 100 years before, involving her ancestors. Curious to understand their path, Alice collects and joins fragments of their past until she reaches Flores, a family of lacemakers in a small town in the Brazilian hinterland, a place marked by backwardness and coronelism, a form of authoritarianism enforced by the area’s colonels. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Flores women used to live under what seemed to be a dark curse: all the men that crossed their lives – whether fathers, sons, brothers or husbands – died early in life. Beliefs, coincidence or destiny, the deaths ended up providing these women with a routine without the presence of male figures, which, while making the people of the city distrust them, it gave the Flores more freedom.
It is in this context that Inês Flores decides to help her best friend, Eugenia, to escape the abuse of her husband, the most powerful man in the region. Together, the two young women create a lace code to communicate through bedspreads and towels and to silently plan a dangerous escape. United by bonds of friendship and companionship created while they work in stitching lace in the blue window house, we find among the lacemakers, characters such as Aunt Firmina, fervent Catholic and guardian of a secret of the past; the widow Carmelita, always longing for her dead; the sensitive Cândida, who perceives the world by sounds and prefers to raise her birds without a cage; and the spirited Vitorina, who tries to shape the future of everyone with lightness and hope.

On this journey in search of her roots, Alice unravels and is also inspired by her family’s history. At a time when women had no voice, their ancestors managed to create, in a discreet but effective way, a sorority. Even if oppressed by the society of that time, the Flores fell silent and made themselves heard through the stitches of their lace.

Selected by World Literature Today as one of the 75 best translations published in the US in 2024.

Publication/Status: Published by Planeta (Brazil) in 2022, by Mondadori (Italy) in 2023, and by Le Seuil (France), Kobiece (Poland), Porto (Portugal), Amazon Crossing (USA/WEL) and Remzi Kitabevi (Turkey) in 2024, by Hanserblau (Germany) and Dar Al-Adab (Lebanon) in 2025. Sold to Humanitas (Romania) and to Mozaiek (Netherlands).  [256 pages]

Full English, French and Italian translations available.
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