James Scudamore is evidently fascin- ated by borderline personality disorder. His characters veer between moments of machismo-fuelled rage, extravagant eloquence and intense introspection.
The Amnesia Clinic (2007), which earned him the Somerset Maugham Award for writers under 35, was set in Ecuador and depicted the tribulations of adolescence. For his second, bolder novel, he crosses the Andes to the even more turbulent setting of Brazil and heaving, torrid Sao Paolo. There are striking similarities between the books — among them a passion for the South American landscape and the quest for personal identity — but the naive charm of The Amnesia Clinic is here replaced by a more brutal force.
Heliopolis tells of Ludo dos Santos’s trajectory from the favela in which he was born to the highest echelons of Brazilian society.
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