Ginga

Cole Bennett spent eleven years making his body smaller and being praised for it.

By twenty-seven he had a professional record, a hospital bill, and a coach who still didn't think anything had gone wrong. So he sold what he owned and moved to São Paulo - a city where nobody knew what he used to be - to learn a sport built on giving way instead of forcing through.

What he finds is a gym that doesn't ask for his story, a teenager making the same mistakes he made at nineteen, and Mel Watanabe, who runs her grandmother's confeitaria three blocks away and is fighting her own inheritance: a family that wants the shop kept exactly as it is, and a country that has never decided whether she is Brazilian enough or Japanese enough to belong to either.

Then a promoter offers him a fight. And a film crew offers to tell everyone how he got better - before he has.

Ginga is a novel about the kind of illness that gets applauded on its way in, and about what it costs to be a very good story about someone who is still, quietly, becoming a person.

ginga (n.) - the low, swaying readiness at the root of capoeira; the Brazilian word for anyone who moves through a fight, a game, or a life by absorbing force instead of resisting it.

For readers of Sally Rooney, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Ann Napolitano, and Gabrielle Zevin.

A note on content: this novel contains depictions of disordered eating in athletes and of a suicidal crisis. No methods are described. Resources are listed at the back of the book.