The Head of the Saint

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

English translation copyright © 2014 by Daniel Hahn

Cover art copyright © 2016 by Richard Bravery

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Originally published in Portuguese as
A cabeça do santo
by Companhia das Letras, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2014.
A cabeça do santo
copyright © 2014 by Socorro Acioli. Subsequently published in English in hardcover by Hot Key Books, London, United Kingdom, in 2014. Work published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil/National Library Foundation.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Quotes in epigraph taken with permission from:

O Vendedor de Passados
by José Eduardo Agualusa (Dom Quixote, 2004)

AvóDezanove e o segredo do soviético
by Ondjaki (Caminho, 2008)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Acioli, Socorro.

[A cabeça do santo. English]

The head of the saint / Socorro Acioli ; translated by Daniel Hahn. — First American edition.

pages cm

“Originally published in Portuguese by Companhia das Letras, São Paulo, Brazil in 2014. Originally published in English in hardcover by Hot Key Books, London, United Kingdom in 2014. Work published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil/National Library Foundation.”

Summary: Having arrived in Candeia, Brazil, starving and footsore, after walking sixteen days to fulfill his dying mother's last wishes, young Samuel takes up residence in an enormous, broken statue of Saint Anthony and finds that he can hear the prayers of the townspeople, despite his lack of faith.

ISBN 978-0-553-53792-5 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-553-53794-9 (glb) — ISBN 978-0-553-53793-2 (ebook) [1. Homeless persons—Fiction. 2. Faith—Fiction. 3. Prayer—Fiction. 4. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 5. Supernatural—Fiction. 6. Anthony, of Padua, Saint, 1195–1231—Fiction.] I. Hahn, Daniel, translator. II. Title.

PZ7.1.A22He 2016

[Fic]—dc23

2014048063

eBook ISBN 9780553537932

Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v4.1

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For Gabriel García Márquez,

Maria Julia Tadeo

and Alquimia Peña,

for that December that changed everything

If you knew the things I believe in, you'd
look at me as though I were a whole great circus of monsters.

—José Eduardo Agualusa,
O
Vendedor de Passados

“Stories from way back then, are they the ones that
have come from a long time ago?”

“Yes, my boy.”

“So way back then is a time, then,
Grandma?”

“Way back then is a place.”

“Quite a faraway place?”

“Quite an inside place.”

—Ondjaki,
AvóDezanove e o segredo
do soviético