Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhood

Award-winning author paulo da costa meditates on fatherhood, place, and memory during a trip to his childhood home in Vale de Cambra, Portugal.

During an extended stay in his childhood home in Portugal, author paulo da costa distills the wide-eyed innocence, joy, and curiosity of his four-year-old son as he meets his aging grandparents and explores an unfamiliar country and culture into a beautiful, tender, and poetic portrait of father-son relationships.

Evocative and heartwarming, Trust the Bluer Skies is a literary time capsule--a father’s vivid account of his son’s early years, a sensory-rich journey through rural Portugal, and a poignant exploration of masculinities that is positive, compassionate, and nurturing.

Born in Angola and raised in Portugal, paulo da costa is a writer, editor, and translator living in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. He is twice the recipient of the 2020 James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction (in 2020 and 2023), the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region, the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize, and the Canongate Prize for short-fiction.