Nem Todas as Árvores Morrem de Pé (2025)

With a highly original structure filled with unforgettable characters and published by Dom Quixote (LeYa), ‘Nem Todas as Árvores Morrem de Pé’ marks Luísa Sobral’s dazzling debut in fiction. This is a novel about two women united by disappointment and the saddest fifty years in German history.

Emmi, who was born shortly before Hitler came to power in Germany, loses her father in the war and has a difficult adolescence, working from an early age to help at home. It is in a bar where she goes with her friends after work that she meets Markus, a man from East Berlin who writes her wonderful letters and with whom she falls madly in love.

Although her mother disapproves of her marriage at a time when the Cold War is raging, her sister supports her, and Emmi ends up moving to the GDR to live with Mischa. Initially, everything goes well, but after the Berlin Wall is erected, the separation of her family and the arrival of an anonymous letter leave her in the deepest depression.

M. is born after the division of the two Germanys and is the perfect fruit of socialism: with an absent mother and raised by a nanny who loves plants, M. idolises his father, completely unaware of the Western world and growing up in a distorted reality. Until one day, upon hearing a girl’s shocking testimony, he discovers that, after all, it is not only the Wall that has another side.