Tieta’s promiscuity, as a teenager, had caused her to be banished from her parents' house and from Agreste, a small, seaside
town in north-eastern Brazil, whose main occupations are goat-breeding and fishing - fishing being a well-disguised front for “smuggling”
Many years later, Tieta the prodigal, returns to the bosom of her family, where her widowed sister Perpetua who is a mean, avaricious, hypocrite and the town’s locals, who seem to have forgiven and forgotten, are all ready to welcome Tieta back with open arms, believing she is the widow of a prominent businessman.
Unbeknown to her family and town folk, Tieta was never the man's wife, but had always been his mistress and had gained both fame and fortune by being the high-class Madam of the ritziest bordello in town!
If the truth was ever revealed about Tieta’s unmarried status and the fact that she had never really repented for her life of sin, but had live the high life as mistress and whore, she would once again face rejection and scorn from the town’s people; who would seek to
destroy her, despite the fact that most of the male inhabitants, unbeknown to their women folk, had frequently paid for and enjoyed her sexual favours in the town’s most notorious
brothel!
But, when the quiet, seaside community is threatened with becoming yet another “environmental disaster”, with the opening of a chemical factory, Tieta, the prostitute, who always had a kind and forgiving heart, soon throws caution to the wind, casts aside her newly acquired respectability and calls up favours from her former brothel clients, one of whom is the local government official Ascanio and together with the town’s people, they fight to defeat the greedy industrialists who are determined to build the dreaded plant, which would pollute and destroy the town's beautiful beaches, with its ugly presence.
Politics, sex and comedy combine in the weirdest possible way, making this a riveting good read!