A young girl who loves to read is tormented by a classmate whose father is a bookseller; another recounts how she became a rose thief; a mother chats with her son over dinner... The thirteen stories in this collection paint incredibly accurate portraits of female characters. They recount their innermost feelings, their greatest joys, their sorrows, and, above all, that fleeting moment of transition—the loss of innocence. A major figure in Brazilian literature, Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) created a unique and polyphonic body of work, permeated by an exploration of the strangeness of the world hidden beneath the apparent banality of things.