Series

Nordeste Agora

Northeast Now

Mariana Salgado is a journalist working the Northeast Brazil beat — environmental corruption, displacement, fraud, accountability. Original investigative fiction written in Brazilian Portuguese, running from B1 to early C1.

About this series

Mariana is 24. She grew up in Rio, studied journalism at UFRJ, spent a year at Brown on scholarship, and arrived in Recife eight months before the first story found her. She works for Nordeste Agora — a small digital newsroom that covers what larger outlets don't.

Each book follows a different investigation. Each investigation takes her somewhere new — a different city, a different institution, a different kind of wrongdoing. The story builds across books. So does the language.

The people she investigates are rarely simple villains. An NGO director who's done twelve years of real good, cutting one corner too many. A councilman protecting his district the only way he knows how, badly. You encounter them the way Mariana does — through documents, through what other people say about them, through what doesn't add up — not through a confession that ties everything up cleanly.

The Northeast of Brazil is not one place. Recife's dialect isn't Fortaleza's, and neither is Feira de Santana's — the series moves through real, specific regions, each with its own institutions, its own relationship to power and to water, its own way of talking. The series is set inside all of that — specifically, not generically.

Portuguese

Tudo que o rio sabe
Nordeste Agora · Livro 1

Recife, PE

Mariana Salgado is sent from Recife into the interior of Pernambuco to find out what happened to an environmental inspector who vanished four days before he was due to testify. She has his field notebook, a set of coordinates that don't match any official map, and a fisherman who says almost nothing at all. The river holds more than anyone is willing to say out loud.

Coming Aug 18
Portuguese

O que o silencio guarda
Nordeste Agora · Livro 2

Fortaleza, CE

Mariana Salgado arrives in Fortaleza to cover the Palco Comunidade — a neighborhood stage built into the closing weekend of the city's biggest music festival. Three days of forró, warm interviews with local musicians, and a community organization happy to open every door she asks about. But the streets behind the stage have been changing in ways the festival program doesn't mention.

In development — no release date yet
Portuguese

A cidade que ninguém vê
Nordeste Agora · Livro 3

Recife, PE

Mariana Salgado is sent into a Recife neighborhood the city's own health system doesn't bother to map, to profile the pharmacist who's quietly kept it alive — free consultations, subsidized insulin, a waiting room that never empties before dark. Dr. Marisa Nogueira knows every patient by name and turns no one away. But the line outside her door is longer than the supply chain says it should be.

In development — no release date yet
Portuguese

Nas margens do que é dito
Nordeste Agora · Livro 4

Feira de Santana, BA

Mariana Salgado arrives in Feira de Santana to cover a mayoral race and the quiet rezoning vote buried inside it — campaign stops, packed public hearings, and a strategist disarmingly honest about how ugly he's willing to play. She's used to being the one asking questions. By the time she has the story, someone else is telling a very different one about her.

In development — no release date yet
Portuguese

Onde o rio começa
Nordeste Agora · Livro 5

Rio de Janeiro, RJ

Mariana Salgado returns to the industrial belt outside Rio de Janeiro where her father spent twenty years on a factory floor — not on assignment this time, but because a labor rights group has found workers with his same symptoms at a plant with his old company's fingerprints all over it. She still has his hospital recor

In development — no release date yet