In 1989, Felipe Pena, then a first-year communications student at UERJ, attended the Juliano Moreira Colony in Rio de Janeiro's West Zone weekly. For six months, he visited the patients, listening to their stories and witnessing their struggles. Some inmates kept a small notebook in which they described their daily lives in the psychiatric wards. It was a collective and chaotic notebook, with different handwriting, overlapping drawings, notes, and scribbles in the margins. Patiently, the future writer listened to everyone who wrote or drew the incomprehensible plot of that story. Twenty-two years later, he used this experience as the genesis and construction of The Back of the Boarding Pass. "It's a book about the irrationality of labels, about stereotypes, about the cognitive avarice with which we judge and are judged. It's much easier to impose a label on someone than to contemplate the complexity, see the nuances, perceive the fractals that make up any personality," explains Felipe. Also the author of the novels "The Perfect Husband Lives Next Door" (2010) and "The Diploma Factory" (2008), Felipe Pena completes the Campus Trilogy with "The Back of the Boarding Pass." All of the works feature a university setting and a recurring character, Professor Antonio Pastoriza. Told in a fragmented fashion, utilizing a variety of resources (a personal diary, a film script, meeting minutes, and online chats), it is simultaneously a love story and a mystery, surprising the reader from the very first pages with the reproduction of a newspaper column that will change the characters' fates.
