It is set in the Alentejo, the rural area of Portugal where Saramago's family came from, and follows the fortunes of the Mau-Tempo family from the beginning of the twentieth century through to its middle. Joao Mau-Tempo suffers the suicide of his father, a drunken cobbler, followed by hardship as hi[...]

The Lives of Things collects Jose Saramago's early experiments with the short story form, attesting to the young novelist's imaginative power and incomparable skill in elaborating the most extravagant fantasies. Combining bitter satire, outrageous parody and Kafkaesque hallucinations, these stories [...]

"If in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Jose Saramago presented us with his vision of the New Testament, in Cain he comes back to the first books of the Bible. An unorthodox itinerary takes him to decadent cities and stables, palaces of tyrants and battlefields, led by the hand of the central c[...]

Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical detail. He embarks on a secret quest to find his double and sets in motion a train of events that he cannot control. Saramago's novel explores the nature of individuali[...]

In an unnamed country on the first day of the new year, people stop dying. Amid the general public, there is great celebration: flags are hung out on balconies and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity - eternal life. Death is on strike. Soon, though, the residen[...]

A driver waiting at traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asyl[...]

Raimundo Silva, a proofreader at a Portuguese publishing house, takes it upon himself to alter a key word in a text to make it read that in 1147 the king of Portugal reconquered Lisbon from the Saracens without any assistance from the Crusaders. His revision of a signal episode in Portuguese history[...]

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among [...]

"A man went to knock at the king's door and said, Give me a boat. The king's house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking at the[...]

Four years after a bizarre blindness plague hits the capital, the political arena is thrown into turmoil when election day is marked by an unprecedented turnout of blank ballots and rebellious acts that prompt a state of emergency declaration. By the Nobel Prize for Literature-winning author of Blin[...]

A previously unpublished novel by a literary master, "Skylight" tells the intertwined stories of the residents of a faded apartment building in 1940s Lisbon. Silvestre and Mariana, a happily married elderly couple, take in a young nomad, Abel, and soon discover their many differences. Adriana loves [...]

Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's brilliant new novel poses the question -- what happens when the grim reaper decides there will be no more death? On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among [...]

In "Blindness, "a city is overcome by an epidemic of blindness that spares only one woman. She becomes a guide for a group of seven strangers and serves as the eyes and ears for the reader in this profound parable of loss and disorientation. We return to the city years later in Saramago's "Seeing, "[...]