The Weight of Bread

A tender, bittersweet novella of family secrets, set in Lisbon’s oldest quarter. For readers of literary fiction, family drama and magical realism.

In the steep, tiled streets of Alfama, Mira Cardoso bakes bread before dawn in the shop her grandmother opened sixty years ago. She has a gift she has never told anyone about. When she hands a customer their loaf, she catches a glimpse of what they carry: a child’s laugh, the smell of jasmine, a moment from someone else’s life.

Then a silver-haired stranger with a guitarist’s hands buys a single broa de milho and eats it on the pavement. What Mira catches this time isn’t his. It belongs to her father, who died when she was four.

The man comes back every day at seven minutes to noon. With each loaf Mira sees more of the father she never knew, and she wants to know more. But her mother turns off the radio whenever a certain fado plays. The neighbours who knew him change the subject. And there is one street in Alfama that Mira has never walked down.

Something happened the night her father died. Everyone around her seems to know what it was. Nobody will tell her.

The Weight of Bread is lyrical and warm, full of the music, food and old loyalties of a Lisbon neighbourhood. It’s a story about grief, about what we keep from the people we love, and about the courage it takes to ask.