“Solitaria is unnervingly stark and simple in structure. . . . Alves Cruz’s Brazil pulses with vital and dangerous but real hope.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Solitaria is a gem. The novel’s clean and elegant architecture—life organized and thwarted across a series of rooms—reveals the intimate experience of power and powerlessness. The social hierarchy of the racial order is articulated subtlety in the spatial arrangements of servitude, all the little hidden rooms that sustain and support the world. The mother-daughter dyad at the center of the story details the intergenerational domination characteristic of the lives of those deemed disposable and at the same time offers the promise of breaking that hold and refusing servitude. I love that the rooms speak.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

“Enthralling and deftly narrated, Solitaria reveals the perils and unseen captivity of lives lived inside the lives of others. The very people who are said to be ‘part of the family’—maids, nannies, doormen and their children—navigate the treacherous waters of their employers’ homes, where everything is breakable, including people. In the tiny spaces where their own humanity is meant to be hidden, the spectre of servitude weighs on mothers and fathers, while sons and daughters learn how to free themselves, along with their families and communities. The way Eliana Alves Cruz manages to conjure up entire lives in such a short book is astonishing—as is the implacable social undercurrent of this novel. An essential novel about class and filiation.” —Catherine Leroux, author of The Future

“Solitaria is a sharp, incisive book; one charged by precise and faithful insights about class, caste, and race, all beautifully woven within a coming-of-age tale that does not hide behind artifice or sentimentality. A work of deep quality, I absolutely loved reading it.” —Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love