Martins’ debut collection, which comprises 13 short stories set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, walks a difficult tightrope with consummate skill: it renders the everyday brutality of favela life with urgency and sensitivity, without ever lapsing into exploitative voyeurism or fetishistic sentimentalism. These stories tell of precociously streetwise youths and their scrapes – or, in the colloquial parlance, perrengues – with petty criminals and law enforcement. The police habitually abuse their powers, harassing, extorting and even killing with impunity, and are duly reviled by the community at large. Martins’ prose, heavily inflected with Brazilian Portuguese street slang, is well served by Julia Sanches’s slick translation into a distinctly urban US English.

In one story a boy frets over the demise of a butterfly that has landed in some cooking oil in his mother’s kitchen; in the very next one, a sadistic copper gets his comeuppance when he is lured into a honeytrap and murdered, and his body incinerated. By flitting between domestic and public settings – between familial tenderness and arbitrary violence – Martins subtly foregrounds his protagonists’ loss of innocence, showing just how easily entire lives can go awry. This is poignantly exemplified in the closing story, “The Crossing”, in which a drug-dealer impetuously opens fire on a young man in response to a minor slight. While disposing of the body in landfill, he rues his own hotheadedness and wistfully recalls his childhood dreams of becoming “a soccer player, an airplane pilot, an IT tech”.

• The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins, translated by Julia Sanches, is published by Faber (RRP £10.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.