"A major literary event that has taken the international publishing community by storm: A best-seller in Brazil, where it received unprecedented critical acclaim, Turbulence has also been translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish, among other major languages. Written by Chico Buarque, one of Brazil's premier singers and songwriters, the novel gives an intense, apocalyptic vision of the paranoia, lawlessness, and nightmare of urban life in Brazil - an extended metaphor for a country facing the menace of a violent confrontation between the rich and the poor." "Set in the decaying and poverty-stricken outskirts of an unnamed city, Turbulence consists of a series of highly charged cinematic scenes, viewed through the dazed eyes of a nameless narrator who moves between two different worlds. An aimless dropout, living on handouts from his rich sister, he belongs by birth to the privileged urban upper crust, with its luxury seaside apartments, its fabulous houses hidden behind electrified high walls and protected by machine-gun-toting security guards, its insanely expensive boutiques and shopping centers, its extravagant parties and trips to Europe. By chance he enters the "other Brazil," the world of marginal and petty criminals that infringes on the edges of privileged society and threatens to engulf it." "Told with compelling urgency, rich in irony, alive with arresting imagery, Turbulence is a haunting novel of kidnapping, assault and robbery, rape, and murder."--BOOK JACKET.