The Tokyo Suite

Marking the English-language debut of one of Brazil’s most compelling contemporary voices, The Tokyo Suite unravels the hidden tensions of modern family life and the quiet fractures running beneath everyday routines.

On an otherwise unremarkable morning, Maju—a nanny worn down by exhaustion and longing—boards a bus in São Paulo with Cora, the young girl in her care, and vanishes. The impulsive abduction sets off a chain reaction that forces everyone touched by the disappearance to confront the truths they’ve kept buried.

Cora’s mother, Fernanda, a high-powered executive in the midst of her own unraveling, is so consumed by marital strain and an affair that she doesn’t immediately register her daughter’s absence. Her husband, equally adrift in the fog of their collapsing domestic life, remains emotionally unreachable. Meanwhile, as Maju moves through the city with Cora, she feels the gaze of the “white army”—Fernanda’s term for the ever-watchful network of nannies—shadowing her every step, feeding her paranoia and urgency.

Madalosso crafts a masterful psychological portrait of guilt, desire, class, and the search for identity. Layered and incisive, The Tokyo Suite is a haunting meditation on the pressures of urban life and the desperate, sometimes unthinkable choices people make in their pursuit of control, connection, and meaning.