Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do coração selvagem) is Clarice Lispector's debut novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December 1943.

[1] The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers on the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Gustave Flaubert, when asked about the similarities.

[2] The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.

To concentrate, she moved out of the tiny maid's room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse, where she worked intensely.

"[6] He steered it to the book-publishing wing of their employer, A Noite, where it appeared with a bright pink cover, typical for books by women, in December 1943.

Critics mentioned James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Charles Morgan.

Its language was noted as sounding completely un-Brazilian; the poet Lêdo Ivo wrote: “Clarice Lispector was a foreigner.

Alongside the foreign climate was that strange voice, the guttural diction which rings in my ears to this day.At the time, Ivo called it "the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language".

The third studio album by the Canadian rock duo Japandroids is called Near to the Wild Heart of Life in homage to Clarice Lispector's novel.

American dream pop band Dollshot named their second album and its title track single Lalande after the word and associated passage in Near to the Wild Heart.