Hyperrealistic, poetic, with an overflowing sensitivity to the infinitesimal, Raduan Nassar gives us in A Girl on the Way a collection of stories that do not depart at any time from the path of excellence that characterizes it. In the story that gives title to the book, we follow in the footsteps of a barefoot girl through the rural and depauperate area in which she lives, and we see with her eyes the things and characters with which she crosses her journey, as if that walk was a decanting of the world, of the whole universe, in her fury and mystery, but also the brazen reflection , the nauseating and picaresque altarpiece of a violent and miserable society. Through the pages of the other accounts of this volume are walked the ghosts of desire—and its absence—of heartbreak, of frustration, of loneliness, all of them recurring themes of the author, with which he composes virtuous variations that will enchant the reader.

Raduan Nassar wrote almost all of his work—consisting of the short stories collected in this book and by the novels Archaic Tillage and A Glass of Cholera, also published on Sixth Floor—during the sixties and seventies of the 20th century. In 1984, despite the enormous success and critical prestige he had reaped, Nassar stated that he had lost interest in literature and abandoned writing and public life, retiring to a small farm where he devoted himself to agriculture. His literary legacy, finally available entirely to readers in the Spanish language, is a brief and dazzling work, perhaps still unknown to the general public but absolutely central to the canon of contemporary Brazilian literature, defined by a powerful and unique voice.