In this 21st novel by Brazil's master storyteller, the central character is a town. Already known to followers of Amado's fiction, Tocaia Grande is here depicted in the days before its elevation to county seat and its change of name to Irisopolis. These are the rawer days of its original settlement some 20 years after the Brazilian emancipation of slaves when it was nothing more than a dump with a store and a cluster of fugitives, whores, and stragglers. It's ``every man for himself'' in this tropical hinterland whose candidacy as a real town comes only with the arrival of one bona fide family consisting almost miraculously of husband, wife, and children.