In 1551, King João III of Portugal gives Archduke Maximilian an unusual wedding present: an elephant named Solomon. On the long and arduous journey from Lisbon to Vienna across the Alps, Solomon and his mahout Subhro become inseparable friends.

With loving detail, Saramago describes this incredible journey with his usual pinch of irony, showing how friendship and solidarity make life worth living even in the most dire situations. Taking historical facts as his starting point, The Elephant´s Journey (“A viagem do elefante”) tells the stories of those who have not found their way into the history books, and he does so with his very characteristic eye, recognising the greatness in the details and the details in the greatness.

Enhanced by João Amaral’s beautiful illustrations, this graphic novel is a feast for the eyes and the soul, and a homage to the Nobel Laureate’s novel.

In his latest book, Bicycles in September (“Bicicletas em Setembro”), Baptista-Bastos depicts the cantankerous and lonely Jesuina, an old lady who spent her life looking after children and never left the house. When he dives into the sea of his memories to reconstruct the time when he lived with her, the narrator, Francisco, remembers how he and his group of friends discovered desire. At the same time, he shows Jesuina’s mature sexuality and brings out an interesting sexual tension between the generations – a tension that is frowned upon by her neighbours, isolating her all the more in her separate world. The setting is the neighbourhood of Ajuda in Lisbon, in the 1950s. The social scope of the novel includes Jesuina herself, a strong personality with a vein of mysticism and eccentricity; the neighbours, conservative and rather trivial ladies; children and teenagers; gypsies and other marginalised characters. Bicicletas em Setembro is a poetic reflection on the loneliness of each character, and the implacable mechanisms of memory.

Speaking of Inside Your Absence (“No interior da tua ausência”) José Saramago stated: “A great novel. A magnificent novel.” The novel has won an award from the International Association of Literary Critics, and speaks of the inexorable passage of time – of the sadness of a man who does not accept ageing, who falls in love, who does not care about ridicule, shame or humiliation when he is consumed by jealousy. “This extraordinary book speaks of all of us,” wrote the essayist and academic Maria Alzira Seixo.

In 1954 Bessa-Luís became famous with the novel The Sibyl (“A Sibila”) which draws a realistic portrait of the rural population of northern Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Considerable psychological astuteness and analytical acuity make this novel a masterpiece of Portuguese literature. In her novels the sexes are separated by traditional gulfs, though these are frequently traversed. The female figures act according to intuition and stand for preservation and permanence. By contrast, the men are interested in bringing about change and accelerating time. The author’s language and narrative technique are reminiscent of Camilo Castelo Branco, the great nineteenth century Portuguese writer. In addition to sensitively portraying characters, Agustina focuses mainly on social and political change in northern Portugal.

Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”) narrates the life of Ema Cardeano, the only daughter of a father who was widowed early. She seems to find happiness when she marries Carlos Paiva, a mediocre doctor from the countryside. Disenchantment with marriage comes quickly, the rites of patriarchal society suffocate her. The successive lovers who were supposed to restore her happiness push her into an increasingly anguished and empty life. Her transgressions are a fleeting consolation, loneliness a path she will forever walk, until the bitter end.
An exceptional rewriting of Madame Bovary and adapted as a feature film by Manoel de Oliveira, Bessa-Luís’ psychological insight is astonishing, the descriptions and the protagonist’s reflections on the female condition dazzling. It is that which is expected in so many books and discovered in so few; simply a masterpiece.

Several of her novels have been filmed by the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira: Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”), The Lands of Risk (“As terras do risco”) as well as Fanny Owen. Agustina Bessa-Luís has also written film scripts (Party) and theatre plays. Between 1986-87 she was editor of the newspaper O Primeiro de Janeiro (Porto). From 1990 to 1993 she directed the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon. Since the 1960s she has been a member of numerous national and international academies and writers’ associations. Her works have been translated into many languages and she has been awarded important literary prizes.

“Perhaps it would have been better to start by talking about the decision to use myself as a character: given that, in a newspaper column, the author is expected to be more openly present, this would be the place where I would try not to run away from myself. I know it was risky: I’ve lived extraordinary stories, I’ve been involved in terrible situations, I too would go mad if I wanted to. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to venture into myself. That’s why the autobiography is unauthorised. I would write my biography by default. The illicit act unmasked in the unauthorised one concerned me alone. I never thought it could be any other way.
Of course, in talking about myself, I would also be talking about those who are or have been with me, those who are or have passed by me. I’m not alone, I’ve never been alone, I don’t know how to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. The others would be safe in my columns, I would be the only one in danger: shattering myself in my memory. I don’t know how to write about what I don’t love. To write is to discover, to know. And to know, if not to love, is at least to be willing to love. To be willing to love ignoble things, sometimes. Which is also frightening. Those I don’t love will never have a place in what I write. What I write is illuminated by those I love, they are the ones who write what I write. Or to put it another way, I am the ones I love, they are the ones who write me.”
– D.M.C

This book is the sequel of the author’s much-celebrated columns published in Visão magazine.

Unauthorised Autobiography (“Autobiografia não Autorizada”), which brings together her much-celebrated literary columns published in the magazine Visão, is of unparalleled intimacy in the author’s work: personal, autobiographical, transparent, and so purified that they become universal, Dulce Maria Cardoso’s columns make room for each of us. Like an armchair that is “moulded, day after day, by the weight of a body, becoming its nest”.
“An autobiography is an impossible mission. I ought to write a rigorous text, but I am always a character of my own self, even if I narrate everything in the first person and call myself Dulce, as if I were not inventing myself. To write is to think slowly. Slowness leavens or germinates as much as it withers or rots. And then there is the other side: you, the ones who are there. As a reader of fiction I inevitably seek the author in his text. What truth does the author hide in the lie he tells? An autobiography works somewhat the other way round: what lie does the author hide in the truth he reveals?”

Eliete is a normal woman in her early forties. There is hardly anything extraordinary about her life, and yet she enthrals us with her desire to live, and to understand people and things.

Her daughters are mostly on the internet and abroad; her husband is easier to meet on Facebook rather than at home. Who cares if Eliete, who feels strongly that her youth is gone, allows herself some escapades on a dating site? She would like to reignite her relationship with her husband, but he doesn’t seem interested. Eliete stays cool and doesn’t despair. Then suddenly she finds someone and something different – an inkling of love? Does Duarte love her like a hero in one of the photo-comic teenage magazines of her childhood? And what on earth does it mean when her dementia-suffering grandmother says that Portugal’s dictator is part of her family story?

Is normal life an everyday drama? It probably is, but still you can laugh at most of it. Written in precise language, Cardoso creates a multifaceted character of great strength. Ironic, but by no means distanced, Eliete – A Normal Life (“Eliete – A vida normal”) reflects on an apparently ordinary life against the background of a three-generation story of the 20th and 21st century in Portugal, in Europe.

The Return (“O retorno”) tells the captivating story of fifteen-year-old Rui, whose family, like a hundred thousand other whites, has to leave Angola after independence from Portugal is declared. For the first time, Rui touches the ground of the “metropolis”, as his mother has always referred to Lisbon in a tone of longing. In this unexpectedly run-down city, Rui not only struggles with the uncertain fate of his father, who stayed behind, but also with finding his place in hostile surroundings. In a personal and clear way, Cardoso describes a crucial moment in Portugal’s history and tells a story that could have happened to so many returners elsewhere in the world. The novel has been voted as number 4 of the 10 favourite books 2014 of the French financial newspaper Les Échos.

Her second novel, Violeta among the Stars (“Os Meus Sentimentos”), revolves around Violeta, a middle-aged woman who earns her living as a sales representative for hair removal products. At the very beginning of the novel Violeta suffers a heavy car crash. Until the end the reader can’t be sure whether she has survived or not. Her subconscience, however, lives on and scenes of the past start moving before her inner eye, overlapping each other and getting mixed up with events just before the accident. Her French-speaking mother, who has a beauty ideal that Violeta could never live up to with her unshapely big body, reappears, as well as her father, who was denounced by his illegitimate son during the Carnation revolution. Violeta also remembers the difficult discussions she had with her daughter Dora, who was idolized and spoilt by her grandparents for being so different from her mother. Having been freed from the burden of her own existence, Violeta, who was often called a scarecrow by people on the street due to her conspicuous presentation, now takes a sharp look behind the façade of her fellow human beings.

Violeta among the Stars captivates the reader by the exceptional narrative talent of Dulce Maria Cardoso and her poetic and precise language. With empathy rather than sentimentality she creates lively characters and draws an unsparing portrait of today’s society.

Field of Blood (“Campo de sangue”) is Cardoso’s first novel, for which she received the Grande Prémio Acontece. Four women who have nothing to say to one another wait nervously in the dim light of an inhospitable room. Four women, all of whom have a special relationship with a man who just committed a murder: his mother, his landlady, his ex-wife and a young girl who is expecting a child from him. The events unfurl in the form of flash-backs in which the relationships of the individual women to each other are highlighted. The narrative returns repeatedly to the point of departure. Except for Eva, the murderer’s ex-wife, no one in this unusual and profound novel has a name. The man and Eva, who both come from poor families, separated six years ago. Although Eva married a rich man immediately afterwards, they continue to meet as lovers. As his wife, Eva used to work to keep them both, and now as his ex-wife she continues to finance him with her new husband’s money B out of exaggerated, almost demented love, it is said. One day the man murders a woman he does not know by stabbing her several times in the chest, explaining afterwards that she was his girlfriend and that he wanted her heart. Beauty and loneliness can cause a person to lose their mind.

In an objective and yet poetic language, Dulce Maria Cardoso describes a world of hopelessness and repressed feelings in which everything is a deceptive game in the search for a truth that does not exist.

A arte de morrer longe (“The Art of Dying Far Away”) is an entertaining satire about a series of apparently unimportant causalities which turn the lives of a middle-class Lisbon couple upside down. Arnaldo and Bárbara have been happily married when one day Bárbara believes she may be in love with her employer’s son. Arnaldo responds by saying that he too is having an affair, although this is not true. On dividing their possessions, they find that neither wants to keep the turtle they once bought together. With fluid language and sharp irony, Mário de Carvalho cleverly portrays society. This amusing novel full of slapstick elements will have the reader laughing out loud or grinning silently to himself.

The protagonists in Carvalho’s novel Mulher em Branco (“Women in White”), Paulo and Laura, have split up. Laura has thrown Paulo out after finding out that he was cheating on her. Their love story had begun many years previously when they fell in love against their parents’ will. But since their child was born, their love seems to have evaporated, and all that keeps them together is dull everyday life. The separation is very painful for them both, because Laura can’t accept that their love is over. She refuses to leave Paulo alone, causing scenes and even attacking him when he comes to their old home to collect a few possessions.

But then a tragic event changes everything: out with his young son one Saturday morning, Paolo receives a phone call and takes his eyes off Afonso for a fateful moment. When he turns around to look for him, Afonso has disappeared without a trace. At his wits’ end, Paulo calls Laura and the police. Laura suffers a shock and loses her memory – this way, she doesn’t have to deal with the loss of her child; she doesn’t even know she had a child and has been through a divorce. The police launch an investigation. Various members of both Laura’s and Paulo’s families are suspected, but the police can’t prove anything.

At the end of the novel, Paolo and Laura meet up again. Laura has now regained her memory, and although the couple don’t get back together they do try to cope with the loss of their child together.

In Mulher em branco, all the characters are unhappy and deserted, enveloped by a kind of Portuguese saudade. Only gradually do the various parts of the jigsaw come together to form a picture, revealing a dense network of interwoven fates.

In his novel Canário (“Canary”) twenty-four-year-old Geraldo pushed his mother’s young lover out of the window during an argument and killed him. He has three years of his five-year prison sentence behind him, and he could be released for good behaviour. He just needs someone to apply for parole for him. Against all expectations, a lawyer really is interested in his case: the friend of the respected writer Alexandre, who proves to be Geraldo’s illegitimate father. Amélia, the young man’s mother, once had a brief affair with Alexandre. She never got back in contact with the author so as to protect his reputation. But now that she is suffering from cancer, she wants to reveal the identity of Geraldo’s father in the hope that he will take care of his son after her death.

The news of the existence of an illegitimate son shatters the fragile harmony in Alexandre’s family. His wife Maria Antónia feels it questions their marriage of over forty years, yet she does not have the strength to leave her husband. The author, whose only interests are himself and above all his own fame, sees the encounter with his unknown son as a way out of his increasingly pressing writer’s block. In his new and last book, he wants to tell the story of a writer whose illegitimate son is in jail. To familiarise himself with this material he has to meet Geraldo, sound him out, suck the blood of his real life.

In the end the young man who struggles desperately to find words, and the famous author who crystallises every experience into sentences on paper, finally do come together in a fatal embrace. After the conclusion of the novel, Geraldo – a canary transformed into a bird of prey, a beast let out of its cage – throws himself on his father from behind as he stands on a cliff, the two of them plunging to their death.

The text is a close-knit mesh of relationships, almost demanding a second reading to get to the bottom of it. One can’t help going back to the beginning and starting over again. And what better can one say about a book?

A mythical place of childhood, but also of madness. An archive of our history, and of its mystery. A naive refuge, or a hiding place for ghosts and fantasies. How many lives can fit into an attic?

The narrator in Attic (“Sótão”), a young woman with two little daughters, has finally split up with her violent partner. It was all too similar to the relationship she witnessed as a child between her mother and her abusive stepfather. Now she has moved into the first place she can call her own, an attic flat, where she tries to write her way into a new life. The attic becomes a place of refuge, of memories from her childhood and her loving biological father, of writing herself free. A place both real and imagined.
Amidst the dust and the creaking of wood, the narrator revisits intimate episodes, memories of violence and relationships that have left their mark; she balances between the learning of independence and the tenderness of motherhood, showing how the body learns to adapt to solitude.

Written in a hesitant, poetic style that strives for precision, Madalena Sá Fernandes depicts the narrator’s struggle with herself and her fears; as the novel progresses, it also becomes a story of self-empowerment and a tentative victory.

Taking the Helm (“Leme”) is the autofictional story of a toxic relationship. In her literary debut, Sá Fernandes deals with the domestic violence she herself experienced as a child at the hands of her stepfather Paulo. He moves in with her and her mother when Madalena is just six years old, and he dominates the lives of the two women for twelve years with his controlling behaviour and outbursts of rage. The aggression is directed above all against her mother, who does not succeed in freeing herself from this relationship for a long time. For Madalena this is hard to bear, she experiences the undermining of the pillars that sustain human relationships and the distortion of the roles of parents and children. She has no choice but to settle into loneliness to overcome her fear and anger, to find a place for herself in the family chaos, and to find comfort in small victories in everyday life.
Later, when she herself was already in danger of repeating her mother’s behavioural patterns in her own relationship, she manages to free herself from this downward spiral. After Paulo’s death, Madalena revisits those years in images of her memories, and she writes to free herself from her stepfather for good. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after the separation, which was then treated with medication. Sá Fernandes succeeds in creating a sensitive portrait of a dysfunctional family, an almost astonished look from a child’s perspective at the absurdity and grotesqueness of what happened. This book is a moment of literary glory and a powerful act of self-empowerment to find one’s own way back into life.

A puzzle book, a scrapbook, a notebook of memories, a collection of notes against the voracity of the present, a eulogy to what matters most in life, a self-questionnaire without definite answers about adulthood and the state of the world – this is Drift (“Deriva”). From nostalgic family holidays to the painful experience of sleeping in a bed with bedbugs; from the slow learning of loneliness to the hatred of wedding parties that seem more like carnivals; from the martyrdom of insomnia to the arduous negotiations between mother and daughters; from the blind navigation of social networks to the conciliatory power of literature; from the rediscovery of therapy to a reunion with a first love: Drift wanders through subjects as diverse and unexpected as the witty or sharp angle that Madalena Sá Fernandes chooses to approach them. A book that confirms the literary resourcefulness of a writer who, looking at herself and her surroundings, gives each reader a kind of reflection in the mirror.

In January 2024, Lídia Jorge began contributing regularly to the opinion pages of the newspaper El País. This volume is a collection of thirty chronicles from that time period and before, one of the earliest being the piece that gives this book its title.

“The Sky Will Fall Upon Us” is the first line of a popular Afghan song, but when adapted as the title of a book of chronicles, its meaning broadens and takes on a global dimension. It captures both the spirit of menace in our times and, at the same time, the strength of resistance made possible by a lucid analysis of the facts.

Lucidity and resistance are perhaps the two words that emerge from these literary chronicles. And nothing could confirm this better than the speech delivered by the author in Lagos on 10 June 2025, during the celebrations of Portugal Day, Camões Day and Portuguese Communities Day. That speech sparked a controversy that in some way highlights the paradoxical circumstances of our times. In essence, with the texts now published in The Sky Will Fall Upon Us. 30 Chronicles and 1 Speech (“O Céu Cairá Sobre Nós. 30 Crónicas e 1 Discurso”), Lídia Jorge aims to “write letters of defiance against all that which history conceals.”

Dona Alberti lives in a nursing home in 2020. She has poor eyesight but assesses the circumstances and people around her with great clarity. She records what is happening, and her daughter transcribes the texts and gives them their literary force by following in the footsteps of this extraordinary character who has kept her memory intact, her imagination fertile, her curiosity for others and her genuine attention to the beauty of the world, while conversing with death as with a legitimate adversary. Relaying memorable moments in the relationship between mother and daughter, Mercy (»Misericórdia«), is a compendium of vital force and faith in life. A story that is at once brutal, ironic and kind, a mixture of tears and laughter that is unforgettable. It shows us an exceptional woman driven by the immortality of hope. A true literary achievement, an admirable testimony to the human condition.

In Every Sense (“Em Todos os Sentidos”), a collection of forty-one chronicles that Lídia Jorge read over the course of a year on Rádio Pública, Antena 2, there are chronicles that face the fury of the contemporary world head-on, interpreting its challenges, dangers and simulacra with a sharp critical eye. But the singularity of these pages of intervention comes, above all, from the fact that the author is capable of combining on the same stage of reflection critical thought about reality and subjective discourse of intimate memory, together with a deeply felt gaze. Inside this book there are unforgettable pages about human life.

Lídia Jorge’s novel Estuary (“Estuário”) is located in present-day Lisbon. The main character is Edmundo Galeano, the youngest son of a shipowning family. After a wrong investment decision by the eldest brother, their possessions are reduced to a house at the mouth of the Tagus and two ships at anchor costing money instead of generating it. In vain the father writes letters to the relevant minister, who was once the boyfriend of his daughter. Edmundo returned three months ago from a posting with a refugee organization in Africa. He lost part of his right hand in an accident in Kenya’s Dadaab, the continent’s largest refugee camp. He now tries to learn again to write by copying out lines from the “Ode Marítima” by Fernando Pessoa. He is planning a book about the tremendous suffering he has seen in Africa, but his father’s suicide and the bad luck that hits his family redirect his interest to his own world and the familiar people around him. In the end he can only write about them.

Estuary is a book about the vulnerability of a man, a family, a society and the very equilibrium of the Earth. A novel of great poetic power about the urgent questions of our time.

Those We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis”) tells the intriguing story of a number of participants in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974. When the journalist Ana Maria is asked to make a documentary about this historic event for a US TV channel, she returns to her native Lisbon. Looking for more information in her father’s house, who was also a journalist, she finds a photo of some revolutionaries, taken some time after the event. As she discovers, they all have their own stories to tell, and their personal experiences will change Ana Maria’s perception of her country forever. Written with great psychological subtlety and power of language, Os Memoráveis is a fascinating literary contemplation of Portugal’s arduous road to democracy.

The Night of the Singing Women (“A Noite das Mulheres Cantoras”) is written with great psychological subtlety and power of language. The student Solange, a member of an all-girl band, witnesses the charismatic lead singer Gisela pressurising young Madalena because she is pregnant, and then covering up her death. Many years will pass before Solange can face up to these events again – and to Gisela, the woman she admired so much back then.

We Shall Fight the Shadows (“Combateremos a Sombra”) is a courageous and political novel about our times and about Portugal in the era of globalisation. It tells the fascinating story of three months in the life of the psychiatrist Osvaldo Campos. In the night of the 31st December 2000, he runs into Rossiana, an assistant radiologist, who has just seen a drug courier die in her clinic when a package burst inside his intestines. The clinic is clearly working together with the drug smugglers. Because she knows too much, she is to be killed, but can hide in the house where Osvaldo works. A love affair develops between her and the psychiatrist.

The immediacy of these events finally shakes Osvaldo awake, and through his patents’ stories and traumas he uncovers a conspiracy trafficking in drugs and human beings, in which important public figures are implicated. Suddenly, the evil gets too much for him. “Lying is connected with death”, he writes in his notebook. He has to act, so he turns to the press. The novel also passes on a message of hope, despite its bleak view of our present.

In the book, Portugal is subjected to a constant downpour. Bridges collapse and the water takes everything with it, including corpses. This apocalyptic vision reflects that of a depressive country, where lethargy and apathy have spread like the floodwater – where, in the author’s words, “the chemists have sold out of sedatives”. The title Combateremos a sombra puts salt in the wound and is an attempt to stir awareness for the injustices which are all too common in Portugal and around the world. With the narrative force we have come to expect, Lídia Jorge invites us to join her in a gripping reading experience.

The novel The Wind Whistling in the Cranes (“O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas”) was published in 2002 and has been awarded the prize of the Günter Grass Foundation, ALBATROS, in 2006. Grandmother Regina Leandro has fled from hospital and is later found dead in front of the entrance to the old cannery in Valmares. Milene, the grand-daughter who lived with her, is the only one there to organise her funeral; her other relatives are away on holiday. Milene, a rather simple-minded person, now tries to find the right words to describe their grandmother’s death to the relatives. The Leandro family, Milene’s aunts and uncles, belong to the wealthy upper-class. The old factory – founded in 1908 – is meantime being rented and lived in by a large family from Cabo Verde. Milene, totally exhausted by the events surrounding the death of her grandmother and initially speechless, is cordially welcomed into that family and stays with them over night.

Thus The Wind whistling in the Cranes is set in two worlds: on the one hand, the history of the cannery, Milene’s aunts and their husbands and men friends, her cousins, all intent on insuring that their reputation is not tarnished by the lonely death of the old woman. All kinds of interests have to be defended, political and financial. The factory is to be sold; the site close to the beach is ideally located for a modern building project. On the other hand, there is the family from Cabo Verde, the old Ana Mata, her daughters and grand-children. A shy relationship develops between Ana Mata’s widowed but young grand-son Antonio, a crane-driver and father of two children, and Milene. When the Leandros finally discover this, they are horrified.

The atmosphere in the novel is coloured by Milene’s unprejudiced view of the people and the events. Looked upon by her relatives as the poor childish orphan, in the very restrictedness of her small world and in all her innocence Milene displays great human warmth and courage.

In her novel The Painter of Birds (“O Vale da Paixão”), the author again takes her readers back to the world of her childhood. The scenery this time is the old house Valmares, in a village in the south of Portugal. The house is still inhabited by the patriarch, his son and his wife and grandchildren. The other children have left home, emigrated, built up a new life for themselves far away. The decades pass the old house by, and increasingly tourism encroaches upon the rural, isolated life – a sign too of the fundamental changes in Portuguese society over the past fifty years. In the meantime, the granddaughter weaves a dense image based on her memories and full of longing for her real father, who went off and left her mother as a young man, returning only once, when she was fifteen years old. With the story of this loving relationship between father and daughter, an image also emerges of the uncertain destiny of a house, a family, and “a society that neither knows what it is, nor what it should do with its rural past”, as the author once put it in an interview. As a result, much of what is presented in the book seems undecided. Dark gaps remain, full of silence and mystery. Lidia Jorge has again written a novel of melancholic beauty.

The novel The Garden without Limits (“O Jardim sem Limites”) takes place in a big old house somewhere in Lisbon. Julieta Lanuit, her husband and two children own the house and rent the first floor to very different young people. One of them starts narrating the stories of their lives, and like in a puzzle draws a complex picture of their dreams and frustrations, their conformity and revolt, their togetherness and their solitude.

Like many of her generation, the experience of the colonial war was decisive for Lídia Jorge: “The history of this war has yet to be written”, she commented. In her next novel, The Murmuring Coast (“A Costa dos Murmúrios”), she writes about it from the point of view of a woman. Twenty years after a period spent in Moçambique as the young wife of a war-struck officer, the narrator looks back on those months and all their ambiguity, in an attempt to gain some clarity on Africa. Estranged as they are from reality, the colonial lords still preserve their aspirations and notions and imagine themselves to be secure, although the uprising of the suppressed people intimates the approaching loss of their centuries old dominance in Africa. With this novel Lídia Jorge has written one of the most powerful books on the colonial war.

One night in a provincial town the corpse of a young woman is found which is completely disfigured. The investigation on the murder of the young woman, who can later be identified, is, however, not the main theme of this unusual and disturbing novel. Her name is Eduarda. Around her four male figures revolve, all with a different relationship to her. So gradually an image of her forms, which is puzzle-like: the father, unable to show her his love, her lover, from whom she had a child and who finally murders her, her colleague at work who is secretly in love with her, and the forensic medical specialist who carries out the autopsy on the corpse. In the course of his work, which he masters to perfection, this man enters into a dialogue with death and tries to draw the last hidden secrets from the corpse. His actions have something religious about them.

An autopsy is like a birth. It cannot be repeated. What remains is the memory of Eduarda, a memory which, more so than life, is the opposite of death. This is My Body (“Este é o meu corpo”) exerts a strange fascination on the reader, and has been justifiably lauded by the critics.

‘Adultery’ means voluntary sexual relations between a married person and someone other than their spouse – and it is the main cause of divorce worldwide (in Portugal there are 89 marriages and 82 divorces per day). However, the history of adultery also includes great myths and stories enshrined in literature, religion, cinema, music and painting. From the Bible (Abraham betrays Sarah with Hagar) to Shakespeare’s plays, from medieval songs to Madame Bovary or The Maias, from the Roman Empire to the political intrigues of contemporary America, from the stories of our kings and queens to the scandals of Hollywood and pop culture, from Ulysses to Cousin Basílio, from the betrayals of the Greek gods to the lives of our neighbours – adultery is a decisive element in the sentimental history of humanity.

Sentimental Dictionary of Adultery (“Dicionário Sentimental do Adultério”) deals with betrayal and passion, temptation or sexual alchemy, the pleasure of risk and desire without order or law – but also with love. And with its fragile nature. This dictionary does not ‘moralise’ or ‘defend adultery’ – it is an erudite and entertaining guide to the history of adultery or passions and their scandals and transgressions.

The Last Seafarers (“Os últimos marinheiros”) portrays the world of the Portuguese people whose main source of livelihood is still seafaring. For most, their connection to the merchant navy is a family legacy, dating back two generations or even further. In the harsh solitude of cod fishing trawlers or in the relative comfort of more or less recent models of fishing or cargo ships, respect for the sea perpetuates its rules. Despite all the machinery, the profession of seafarer retains something intrepid and adventurous.

Portugal has 2,830 kilometres of coastline and is the third largest European Exclusive Economic Zone and the 11th largest in the world. Even so, there is not a single radio weather report that indicates the state of the sea. On board a commercial cargo ship and a trawler, Filipa Melo went to meet our last seafarers. Men and women who face the sea every day and do justice to our most mythical past, against all winds and tides.

His first novel Baía dos Tigres (“Bay of Tigers”) could also be described as a large-scale report and as travel literature in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin. This is an astonishing book about the author’s journey from Angola (Luanda) to Mozambique taking three and a half months. Mendes’ world presents itself to the reader like an old-fashioned junk shop, only that the journey is arduous and not quite as romantic. It takes the reader through a crisis-ridden and war-torn country. The journey resembles a trip to the heart of darkness, to the end of humanity, as one critic put it. And herein lies the true significance of Baía dos Tigres. Pedro Rosa Mendes has succeeded in writing an unusual text, which is very subtly composed, a text which, on the basis of countless individual fates, unfurls the everyday panorama of southern Africa, while at the same time painting a vigorous portrait of man.

In September 2000 Pedro Rosa Mendes was awarded the Prize for the Best Novel by the Portuguese PEN Club and the Literature Prize of Cascais.

In Peregrinação de Enmanuel Jhesus (“The Pilgrimage of Enmanuel Jhesus”), Pedro Rosa Mendes lends his voice to East Timor, its complex history and varied landscape, its colourful people and richly influenced culture. Interwoven with the protagonist Alor’s story – an architect travelling the island – historical events, political remembrances, theological debates, descriptions of martial arts and many other gems from this unique island’s treasure trove enrich the narrative and leave the reader fascinated with what he has learned in the process. True to his style and in beautiful language, Pedro Rosa Mendes renders the horrors East Timor has had to suffer in skilfully composed fragments.