"This short but profoundly moving novel by the young Brazilian writer is one of the finest explorarions of love you will find anywhere this year"

John Freeman, The Boston Globe

Bensimon delivers a brilliant novel, which tells the intimate journey of two students through the heart of Rio Grande do Sul. She develops a narrative attentive to details, freshly portraying human landscapes."

Lire Magazine Littéraire

"With intense poeticity, Bensimon traces a new map of affections without taboos. Her portrait of deep Brazil and her brief sketches of Paris are surprising for their delicacy and originality."

Les Echos

"A beautiful and melancholy love story."

Libération

"In her second novel, Carol Bensimon deals with the tensions inherent to the affirmation of cultural identity and to the exercise of individual freedom in early 21st century. (...) Along this journey, Bensimon builds memorable passages".

Roberto Taddei, Folha de S. Paulo

WE ALL LOVED

COWBOYS

Cora e Julia haven't spoken in years. The intense relationship from their college days ended strangely, with Julia’s sudden departure to Montreal. Cora, some time later, enrolls in a fashion course in Paris. One night in the winter of the northern hemisphere, both of them resume contact and decide to meet up back in their home town, in the extreme south of Brazil, to finally take the road trip they'd planned together long before.

In the Italian colonies up in the mountains, among the desolated landscape of the Pampa, in a ghost town in the heart of Rio Grande do Sul, the two girls' daily lives start to steer towards their common past and private individual conflicts: while Cora needs to deal with the fact that her dad, married to a much younger woman, is about to have a second child, Julia needs to come to terms with an american ex-boyfriend and a childhood trauma. As they move forward through neighboring cities and dusty hotels, the very relationship between the two transforms itself, as if something in their past history insisted on breaking into the story they are living then.

The characters in We All Loved Cowboys wander like outsiders in their own homeland, trying to grasp their own identities, in landscapes as familiar as they are fleeting. In a prose that is simultaneously harsh and tender, and which captures with anti-sentimental precision a moment of uncertainty and changes, Bensimon drives the displaced Cora into this trip, which acquires contours of sarcasm, post-feminism and drama. It's a journey that moves back and forth, between memories of the 90's, fragments of life in Paris, and the promise of freedom that the vast landscape of the South brings. A western with a heroine in Doc Martens.