Series

Nordeste Agora

Northeast Now

Five books, five cities in the Northeast of Brazil, and a reporter who keeps asking after everyone else has stopped. Original investigative fiction written in Brazilian Portuguese, running from B1 to early C1.

About this series

Mariana Salgado covers the Northeast of Brazil for a small newsroom in Recife. Environmental inspection, municipal contracts, land, water, and who signed what and when. These are the stories that get filed as routine and stay that way unless somebody keeps asking.

Nordeste Agora follows her across five books and five cities. A different place each time, a different institution, and a different version of the same discovery: the paperwork was in order, every step was legal, and that is exactly how nothing changed.

She is careful in a way that costs her — she will not say a thing out loud she cannot prove. She is also a carioca working in a region that hears it in her first sentence, and that gap never entirely closes.

The series is built to move you. Book one opens at B1. By book five you are reading at early C1, and the support has thinned out along the way. Glossaries shorten. Language notes appear only where they earn it. A word explained once is never explained again. You finish the arc reading the way you read in your own language — from context, without stopping.

Original investigative fiction, written in Brazilian Portuguese for people learning the language. Not simplified versions of existing books.

Five books, read in order, beginning with Tudo que o rio sabe.

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 a week 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.

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Free sample available
Portuguese

O que o silêncio guarda
Nordeste Agora, Livro 2

Fortaleza, CE

Eight months of court reporting have taught Mariana Salgado what a clean file looks like. She is sent to Fortaleza to write about a neighborhood music stage, and the file she ends up reading there is immaculate: every notice served, every deadline met, every signature where it belongs. Two hundred families have left Vila Aurora. She arrives certain she already knows the shape of this story.

Coming Nov 9

Free sample available
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