Book Attic - Madalena Sá Fernandes

Attic - Madalena Sá Fernandes

A work of contemporary Portuguese literature about childhood, memory, home, loneliness, violence, autonomy, and motherhood.

Official Synopsis

A mythical place of childhood, but also of madness. A mysterious archive of our history, and its fabulation. A naive refuge, or a hiding place for ghosts and fantasies. How many lives can fit in an attic?

Amidst the dust and the creaking wood, Madalena Sá Fernandes revisits intimate episodes, memories of violence and relationships that left their mark, balancing the learning of autonomy with the tenderness of motherhood, showing how the body learns to adapt to loneliness.

A slanted space between floor and sky, the attic is where unused objects accumulate, stories no one knows, unarranged photographs, persistent fears. Delving into this place of confinement and creation, of vigilance and freedom, the author questions the very idea of home: shelter, prison, promise, fiction.

Madalena Sá Fernandes tests the resistance of floors and beams as if they were the gears of memory, peeks out the high window at the treetops to conquer fear, surrenders to silence so that her writing can be heard. An attic, after all, is never empty.

Architected around the idea of a perpetual movement between past and future - between the homes we inherit, those we try to build, and the always uncertain possibility of finding a place where we can finally stay - Attic fits into the tradition of narratives that are a key to the present we share.