Translated by Giovanni Pontiero . Ricardo reis has returned home to Lisbon after a long sojourn in Brazil. The year is 1936, and the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar is establishing himself in Portugal, edging his country toward civil war. At the same time, Dr. With no intention of resuming his practice, reis now dabbles in his own poetry, wastes his days strolling the boulevards and back streets, engages in affairs with two different women—and is followed through each excursion by Pessoa’s ghost.
What’s brought him back is word that the great poet, Fernando Pessoa, has died. As a fascist revolution roils, and as reis’s path intersects with three relative strangers—two living, one dead—Reis may finally discover the reality of his own chimerical existence.
The History of the Siege of Lisbon: A Novel
Fluent in portuguese, he has been assigned to work on a standard history of the country, and the twelfth-century king who laid siege to Lisbon. Through rainmundo and maria’s eyes, what transpires is an alternate view of history and a colorful reinvention of a debatable truth. It’s a serpentine journey through time where past and present converge, and fiction and reality blur—especially for Rainmundo and Maria themselves, fact becomes myth, who begin to find themselves erotically drawn to each other.
Raimundo silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a “brilliantly original” novel by a Nobel Prize winner Los Angeles Times Book Review. This hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination.
Publishers weekly Translated by Giovanni Pontiero .
Baltasar and Blimunda: A Novel Harvest Book
Weaving together multiple storylines to present both breathtaking fiction and incisive commentary, political satire, religious criticism, José Saramago spins an epic and captivating yarn, equal parts historical fiction, renowned Portuguese writer and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, and whimsical romance.
The portuguese king promises the greedy prelates of the Church an expansive new convent, should they intercede with God to give him an heir. Meanwhile, amid the fires and horrors of the inquisition, angry crowds and abused peasants rejoice in spectacles of cruelty, from bullfighting to auto-da-fe; disgraced priests openly flout God’s laws; and chaos reigns over a society on the brink of disaster.
A romance and an adventure, a rumination on royalty and religion in 18th-century Portugal and a bitterly ironic comment on the uses of power. The new york times Portugal, 1711.
The Stone Raft Harvest Book
At once an epic adventure and a profound fable about the state of the European project, The Stone Raft is a “hauntingly lyrical narrative with political, social, and moral underpinnings” Booklist that “may be Saramago’s finest work” Los Angeles Times. Panic ensues as residents and tourists attempt to escape, while crowds gather on cliffs to watch the newly formed island sail off into the sea.
One day, quite inexplicably, the Iberian Peninsula simply breaks free from the European continent and begins to drift as if it were a sort of stone raft. As bureaucrats ponder what to do about their unusual predicament, the intertwined lives of these five strangers are clarified and forever changed by a physical, spiritual, and sexual voyage to an unknown destination.
Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. A “marvelously amusing” political fable in which part of the European continent breaks off and drifts away on its own Publishers Weekly, starred review.
The Cave
A remarkably generous and eloquent novel. Publishers weekly Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. Astonishingly, the center places an order for hundreds, and Cipriano and Marta set to work—until the order is cancelled and the penniless trio must move from the village into The Center. People prefer plastic, apparently.
When mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their new apartment, Cipriano and Marçal investigate; what they find transforms the family’s life, in a novel that is both “irrepressibly funny” The Christian Science Monitor and a “triumph” The Washington Post Book World. Those qualities are particularly evident in his latest brilliant, dark allegory, which links the encroaching sterility of modern life to the parable of Plato’s cave .
. . An unassuming family struggles to keep up with the ruthless pace of progress in “a genuinely brilliant novel” from a Nobel Prize winner Chicago Tribune. On one such trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries.
All the Names
The loneliness of people’s lives, the effects of chance, the discovery of love—all coalesce in this extraordinary novel that displays the power and art of José Saramago in brilliant form. From a nobel prize winner: “A psychological, even metaphysical thriller that will keep you turning the pages .
. . With growing alarm and alacrity. The seattle times a washington post book world favorite book of the Year Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city’s Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space.
The Double: A Novel
It’s tempting to think of The Double as his masterpiece. The new york times translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa . Tertuliano watches the film, unimpressed. Against his own better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. But during the night, when he is awakened by noise, more specifically, exactly like he did five years earlier, he finds the VCR replaying the video and watches in astonishment as a man who looks exactly like him—or, mustachioed and fuller in the face—appears on the screen.
To lift his spirits, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. A “wonderfully twisted meditation on identity and individuality” from a Nobel Prize–winning author who pushes fiction to its very limits The Boston Globe. As he roots out the man’s identity, what begins as a whimsical chase becomes a probing investigation into what makes us human.
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The Gospel According to Jesus Christ Harvest in Translation
. In this provocative, the foundations of the Church, tender novel, Saramago questions the meaning of God, the subject of wide critical discussion and wonder, and human existence itself. His idea of the holy family reflects the real complexities of any family, and—as only Saramago can—he imagines them with tinges of vision, dream, and omen.
The result is a deft psychological portrait that moves between poetry and irony, spirituality and irreverence of a savior who is at once the Son of God and a young man.
Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture
Infused with the tenderness and intelligence that have become familiar to his readers, Saramago's Journey to Portugal is an ode of love for a country and its rich traditions. Forfeiting sources of information such as tourist guides and road maps, he scours the country with the eyes and ears of an observer fascinated by the ancient myths and history of his people.
. Always meticulously attentive to those elements of ancient Portugal that persist today, Saramago examines the country in its current period of rapid transition and growth. Whether an inaccessible medieval fortress set on a cliff, explorers, writers, painters, saints, or a grand mansion in the city, the extraordinary places of this land come alive with kings, warriors, a wayside chapel thick with cobwebs, and sinners.
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Night Train to Lisbon
. . The closer raimund comes to the truth of prado’s life, an extraordinary tale takes shape amid the labyrinthine memories of Prado’s intimate circle of family and friends, working in utmost secrecy to fight dictatorship, and eventual fate, and the betrayals that threaten to expose them. Raimund gregorius, a professor of dead languages at a Swiss secondary school, lives a life governed by routine.
Allusive and thought-provoking, intellectually curious and yet heartbreakingly jaded, ” and inexorably propelled by the haunting mystery at its heart The Providence Journal. Night train to lisbon was adapted into bille august’s award-winning 2013 film starring Jeremy Irons, Christopher Lee, Lena Olin, and Charlotte Rampling.
Then, an enigmatic portuguese woman stirs his interest in an obscure, and mind-expanding book of philosophy that opens the possibility of changing Raimund’s existence. That same night, amadeu de prado, he takes the train to Lisbon to research the book’s phantom author, a renowned physician whose principles led him to confront Salazar’s dictatorship.
Among them: his eighty-year-old sister, who maintains her brother’s house as if it were a museum; an elderly cleric and torture survivor confined to a nursing home; and Prado’s childhood friend and eventual partner in the Resistance.
In the Night of Time: A Novel
One of the most eloquent monuments to the Spanish Civil War ever to be raised in fiction. The washington post, “the top 50 fiction books for 2014” “An astonishingly vivid narrative that unfolds with hypnotic intensity by means of the constant interweaving of time and memory . . . Labyrinthine and spellbinding .
. . Crossing the fragile borders of europe, his transformation from a bricklayer’s son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, Ignacio reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever altered his life.
Winner of the 2012 prix méditerranée Étranger and hailed as a masterpiece, In the Night of Time is a sweeping, grand novel and an indelible portrait of a shattered society, written by one of Spain’s most important contemporary novelists. Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty.