Ever since anthropology PhD student Clara Lemont started researching the African-Brazilian religion of Odùn, her days and nights became filled with dreams of swirling figures of white, drum beats and yellow eyes haunting her in the darkness. When Clara travels to Brazil to do fieldwork, she quickly finds herself immersed in a world of dark intrigue, political corruption, black magic and desire. Travelling across time and space to be reunited with her eternal lover, history, politics and sex all collide as the female energy of the goddesses and the transformative power of love combat the dark forces of evil. An evocative and sweeping tale of myth and magic, from a seventeenth-century escaped slave community in northern Brazil to 1930s Rio de Janeiro, Clara Awake will take you on a sensual journey of intense passion, intrigue and love.

Melinda Vandenbeld Giles is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and lecturer in Social Anthropology and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has published an edited collection titled Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism (2014), and will be co-editing a Companion to Motherhood forthcoming in 2018. Clara Awake, inspired by her graduate research on African-Brazilian religions, is her debut novel.

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