São Paulo, a day in May 2000. In 69 scenes - flashes of light, voices, thoughts - the debut novel of the Brazilian exceptional author Luiz Ruffato crafts a kaleidoscopic image of the megacity São Paulo with its glamour, its misery, its hypocrisy, and its pain. Each of the stories has its own voice, its own tone, its own social hue. With almost paranoid precision, Luiz Ruffato manages to poetically capture the sounds, the smells, the colors, and the fears of a 22-million-strong city, assembling them into a disturbing portrait of a torn society.