The Besieged City

Clarice Lispector author Johnny Lorenz translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:1st Aug '19

Should be back in stock very soon

The Besieged City cover

Clarice Lispector's revelatory third novel, now in English for the first time.

'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' Colm Tóibín

'She suddenly leaned toward the mirror and sought the love­liest way to see herself'


Lucrécia Neves is vain, unreflective, insolently superficial, almost mute. She may have no inner life at all. As she morphs from small-town girl to worldly wife of a rich man, and her small home town surrenders to the forces of progress, Lucrécia seeks perfection: to be an object, serene, smooth, beyond the burden of words or even thought itself. A book that obsessed its author, The Besieged City is unlike any other work in Lispector's canon: a story of transformation, of what it means to see and to be seen.

Prolific and peerless ... a Brazilian national treasure ... Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind ... through her texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place -- Carlos Valladares * Gagosian Quarterly *

ISBN: 9780241371374

Dimensions: 197mm x 130mm x 11mm

Weight: 171g

224 pages