About the Book: International Booker Prize Shortlisted 2026, this powerful and unsettling novel explores violence, punishment and the consequences of social and political failure. On land once marked by the torture and murder of enslaved people, a remote penal colony is nearing the end of its operations after decades of failing to rehabilitate its inmates. Then a terrifying ritual begins: on every full-moon night, the prisoners are released and hunted by the armed warden. As each man fights to survive and escape, Ana Paula Maia delivers a raw, brutal examination of human nature, institutional violence, guilt and our collective responsibility for the horrors we create.