Diorama

After years spent outrunning her past, Cecília reexamines the case of a close family friend killed by a colleague and rival: her father.

In 1988, shortly after Brazil reestablishes democratic rule, a state congressman is shot and killed in Porto Alegre. The main suspect: a close friend and colleague in congress, Representative Raul Matzenbacher.

Many years later, Cecília Matzenbacher, his daughter, migrates from Southern Brazil to California, where she finds work as a taxidermist. Her temperament is ideally suited to this type of restoration and the careful reconstruction of a world frozen in time. But as Cecília confronts her own history and the memories of the investigation surrounding her father, her knack for composition frays.

When news arrives that Raul has suffered a stroke and Cecília's chances to see him again may be limited, her past can no longer stay put, posed like a specimen behind glass. Her story emerges, the past stalking her present, threatening to derail the life she's made for herself in the United States.

In sleek, arresting prose imbued with the suspense-filled edge of a true-crime thriller, Diorama cements Carol Bensimon's status as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary Brazilian literature and demonstrates her narrative gifts at their apex. Fusing police procedural, coming-of-age story, and family drama, Diorama is a moving mystery about how we remember what's passed, endangering our notions of what is or isn't still alive inside all of us.

Author: Carol Bensimon
Publisher: MCD
Published: 03/03/2026
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.80w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780374616038


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/12/2026
Booklist 02/01/2026
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2026

About the Author

Carol Bensimon was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1982. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel O Clube dos Jardineiros de Fumaça, which won the Jabuti Award, the most prestigious literary award in Brazil, and was short-listed for the São Paulo Prize for Literature. She is the author of the novels We All Loved Cowboys and Sinuca embaixo d'água and of the acclaimed story collection Pó de parede. In 2012 she was selected by Granta as one of the Best Young Brazilian Novelists. Bensimon has a master's degree in creative writing from PUCRS and lives with her wife in Mendocino, California.

Zoë Perry's translations of contemporary Brazilian fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Astra, The White Review, and elsewhere. Her translation of "My Good Friend" by Juliana Leite, published in The Paris Review, was awarded a National Magazine Award for Fiction and was selected by Amor Towles for a 2024 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. Perry's translation of Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia won the 2024 Republic of Consciousness prize and the inaugural Cercador Prize, and was short-listed for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Julia Sanches translates works from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Her translations include Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim Award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. She is a founding mem