Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called Hurricane Clarice: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.

The book was an unprecedented sensation - the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.