THE COLLECTOR OF FAREWELLS

Samuel Nardi works at a notary's office in Curitiba, Brazil. His job takes him to hospitals, nursing homes, and private houses to draw up powers of attorney and wills: checking documents, hearing last wishes, collecting signatures, and leaving out everything that has no legal effect.

But it is after the briefcase closes that people say what matters most.

Convinced that those words should not simply vanish, Samuel begins writing them down, in secret, in black notebooks. What starts as a quiet act of listening becomes, over the years, a collection of farewells: a kitchen painted twice in the same year, a key left with a neighbor, a debt no one collected, a dog that needs someone to take him in.

Until the words he has kept slip out of the room and into the newspaper.

Facing families who demand answers, a notary who answers for everything that happens in her office, and Elisa, a night-school teacher used to looking her own decisions in the eye, Samuel must confront the question he has put off for years: by recording someone's memory, does he preserve it or take possession of it?

Restrained, precise, and deeply human, The Collector of Farewells is a novel about memory, intimacy, love, and responsibility, and about the distance between keeping a person's words and understanding the whole life that came before them.