Luize Valente

Personal website
Luize Valente was born in Rio de Janeiro, but she has double citizenship in Brazil and Portugal. Passionate about History, she graduated in Journalism and, for over 20 years, worked as a TV journalist and documentarist. In 2012, she published her first book; from then on Luize became a bestselling author of historical novels.
In 2016, she left her job at TV-Globo to dedicate herself solely to writing and to conferences on her recurring themes – social hatred and prejudice in History; love, and empathy as the only redemption for the human species. She also offers regular writing workshops for aspiring writers.
THE FRATERNITY OF THE OLIVE TREE
An almost 500-year-old olive tree is the starting point of this historical novel that has the Portuguese Inquisition as a background. After opening in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, the narrative goes to Santarém, Ribatejo province, Portugal, in the beginning of the 16th century, right after the forced conversion of the Jewish population into Catholicism; then the plot gets back to close in the current days. THE FRATERNITY OF THE OLIVE TREE tells the saga of Branca Oliva Botas, mother of Duarte Botas Montalvão and Branca Botas Montalvão. Duarte was seven years old when his mother was persecuted and imprisoned under the accusation of being a heretic who practiced the Hebrew religion: never again would he see her. Branca was pregnant by then, and baby Branca was born in the jails of the Holy Office, having only a couple of hours with her mother.
Branca Botas’ odyssey will be revealed almost 500 years after her death, when one of her descendants, Branca Oliva, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1968, inherits a centenary olive tree in Santarém. She leaves for Lisbon decided to obtain her Portuguese passport departing on a journey to the past of a family whose memory lives in the roots and branches of an olive tree.

Publication/Status: To be published in March 2026 by Autêntica.
SONATA IN AUSCHWITZ (SONATA EM AUSCHWITZ)
The two opening chapters of this novel were chosen to represent the Portuguese contribution in the anthology “18 Jewish Stories – translated from 18 languages”, edited by Nora Gold, from the journal Jewish Fiction.net, together with pieces byes by Isaac Babel, Elie Wiesel, Lili Berger, and Norman Manea. In Brazil, SONATA IN AUSCHWITZ sold over 30.000 books.

A baby born in the Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks in October 1944. A Sonata composed by a young German officer, on the same date, also in Auschwitz. Two stories that cross paths and complete each other. Decades later, Amalia, Portuguese daughter of a German father, starts to lift the veil that covers the Nazi past of the family from a musical score revealed by an unknown great-grandmother, signed by her grandfather Friedrich and entitled Für Haya (for Haya).
The question of whether her grandfather, considered deceased before the end of the Second World War, could be alive in Rio de Janeiro, leads her to cross the ocean and meet a Holocaust-surviving Jewish couple, Adele, and Enoch. The rise of Nazism in Berlin, the saga of the Hungarian Jews of Transylvania, the mysteries that occurred in the extermination camp in Poland and the post-war era in a house full of secrets in a Potsdam lake offer the paths that Amalia will travel to piece the puzzle together.

Publication/Status: Published by Record (Brazil), Saída de Emergência (Portugal), Tre60 (Italy), Les Escales (France), Bukowy Las (Poland) and Ombra GVG (Albania). [378 pages]
A SQUARE IN ANTWERP (UMA PRAÇA EM ANTUÉRPIA)
Octogenarian Olívia Braga de Almeida, the owner of one of the largest supermarket chains in Brazil, watches the sunrise on the first day of the new millennium from the balcony of her apartment in the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro. Her granddaughter, Tita, comes in and surprises her with an old picture in which Olívia, young and pregnant, is seen beside an unknown man and a young boy in a square in Antwerp, Belgium. In another picture from about the same time, Olívia is seen by her husband, Antonio, and her son – who had just passed away – Luiz Felipe. The truth becomes known: “Olívia” is, in fact, Clarice, the woman in the picture from Antwerp, pregnant with Helena (Tita’s mother), mother of young Bernardo and wife to German Jew Theodor Zuskinder, the father of her children. The true Olívia – the one in the other photo – was her twin sister, with whom she exchanged
photo – was her twin sister, with whom she exchanged identities sixty years earlier on a Spanish border while fleeing in the middle of World War II. After this revelation, Tita takes her grandmother on a trip through time, during which Clarice narrates the saga of her family and the twist of fate that caused them to switch places. Then they take a real trip to Portugal and Antwerp where she finally rescues her long-lost identity. A story of mistaken identities, loyalties betrayed or kept to the end, and unrequited love, through the horrors of the II World War and Nazism up to nowadays.

Publication/Status: Originally published by Record (Brazil) in 2015 and just relaunched by Leya (Brazil). Also published by Saída de Emergência (Portugal). [364 pages]
THE GIRL WITH A STAR (A MENINA COM ESTRELA)
Alma and Eva are best friends. More than that, they are “sibling friends”, as they were both born in the same year, month, day, city, and street, one only a couple of hours before the other. Since their early childhood, they spend time together, play together and help one another when they need. Even though they are sibling friends and as everybody else have two eyes, one nose and one mouth, many people say they are completely different from one another to the point that they couldn’t even co-live in the same street, in the same city, in the same country.

Alma and Eva are growing up during the Second World War, when people would face the most challenging difficulties. One of them being the prohibition of getting together with the beloved ones. By then, the world was divided: two opposite sides were fighting to know who would win, and nobody would live calmly and happily, even if on the victorious side. But the girls’ friendship resists to everything, thanks to their courage to be together and to that old star. It belongs to Eva, but she doesn’t hesitate to give it to Alma when her sibling friend most needs it.
With a narrative that is at the same time delicate and intense, gathering the young readers’ attention until the end, and with the historical accuracy that distinguishes Luize Valente’s work, THE GIRL WITH A STAR is the bestseller author’s first foray into young literature, a gem about a chapter of human history that can never be forgotten. Publication/Status: By Leya (Brazil) in 2022. [128 pages]
THE SECRET OF THE SHRINE (O SEGREDO DO ORATÓRIO)
A fascinating mix of adventure, mystery and love story, this novel reveals Brazilian’s Jewish roots through the saga of a “New Christian” family that crosses three centuries. (Jewish families made to convert to Christianity by the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil were called “New Christians”.) In order to discover the origin of her ancestors, the protagonist, a young doctor named Ionah, starts a journey in the backlands of the North-East, passes by São Paulo and ends in New York, where converted Jews from Brazil founded the first North American Jewish community and synagogue.
The journey is marked by revelations and encounters. When Ionah discovers a secret kept for almost ten generations inside a shrine, her life is forever changed.

Publication/Status: Published by Record (Brazil), in 2012, and by Nieuw Amsterdam (Holland), in July 2013.

English sample chapters.
Facebook Instagram

Copyright © 2023. LVB&Co. Literary Agency.