The Stone Raft

A majestic tale, rich in allegory, wit and philosophy; another masterpiece from the Nobel prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago.

An irresistible blend of shrewd detail and lyrical fantasy... A seductive novel that needs to be savoured

An invitation to one of the richest bodies of work by a living writer

Jose Saramago's brilliant evocation...is magical realism of a sort that stirs real wonder

Saramago's lovely and original questing story, in a lineage of others such as Don Quixote and Kipling's Kim, is a journey of the spirit told as a journey of the feet

Tremendous wit is always apparent in his imaginative conceits, comic digression and verbal and narrative games

An engaging fantasy...this book can't be pinned down however, either as magic realism, Swiftian satire, or dystopian science fiction: in fact its concerns are largely philosophical... Pontiero's excellent translation preserves the strange, looping rhythms of Jose Saramago's prose, as well as his likeably self-referential humour and, most important of all, the sense of a deep and luminous intelligence which informs the whole enterprise

José Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.

What if, one day, Europe was to crack along the length of the Pyrenees, separating Spain and Portugal from the rest of Europe? 
 
In Saramago's fable, a new island is sent spinning through the ocean like a great stone raft. While the authorities panic and tourists flee, three men, two women and a dog are drawn together by omens that burden them with a peculiar responsibility. In this magical realist tale, the six take to the road, finding themselves adrift in a world now unfamiliar and forced to reckon with their relationships, human psychology and the shakiness of belief itself.

Small Memories

A delightful insight into the formation of an artist who would become one of the world's most respected writers.

The voice of Small Memories is so immediate, genial and full of simple affection for the boy he was, that reading it feels very much like sharing a fireside with a talkative uncle

A moving account of his childhood and adolescence...Small Memories will delight

A real insight into the making of a great writer

It's impossible not to be charmed by this fluid, spontaneous-seeming memoir of boyhood from the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramago [...] For all its delightful novelty, however, the childhood described here is also beguilingly universal: the superstitions and terrors, the mysteries and joys

The great thing about this memoir of boyhood is how unportentous it is for the most part

The lasting impression left by the self-portrait is of an abiding loneliness, nostalgia, and loss, leavened by humour and an unfeigned humility

The humiliations and joys of childhood, magnified by time, are delicately revisited

The elliptical prose style that earned Saramago the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 imbues these snapshots with a sense of time irrecoverably lost as the author, who died earlier this year, reprises the significant episodes of his youth. Any lack of drama will be of little consequence to admirers of Saramago, whose mostly rural vignettes reflect the emotional pitch of an illustrious literary career

A delightful insight into the formation of an artist who would become one of the world's most respected writers. 
 
Born in 1922 in the tiny Portuguese village of Azinhaga, José Saramago was only a baby when his family moved to a series of cramped lodgings in a working-class neighbourhood of Lisbon. Nevertheless, he would return to the village throughout his early life, its river and olive groves seeping deep into his memory. 
 
 Shifting between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this touching book is a mosaic of memories. Written with characteristic wit and honesty, Small Memories traces the formation of an artist always fascinated by language and who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world's most respected writers.

A Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture

Journey to Portugal

José Saramago takes us on a thrilling literary journey through the land, history and moods of his native country

No portico, farmhouse or ancient church is left undisturbed in Saramago's readable, if labyrinthine, tale of travelling across his homeland in 1979

None but a Portuguese could have written this book; none but Saramago could produce travel writing like this. It is a wholly appropriate tribute to that astonishing juncture where the sea ends and the land begins

A book that...is a search for his country's heartbeat... The writing is, as always with Saramago, dense: a labyrinth of meaning and innuendo. But what is clear is that he loves Portugal.

One feels privileged to be in his company... This book is a joy to pick up and a delight to read

José Saramago takes us on a thrilling literary journey through the land, history and culture of his native country. 
 
From the misty mountains of the north to the southern seascape of the Algarve, the travels of Nobel Laureate José Saramago are a passionate rediscovery of his own land. 
 
 Embarking in the autumn of 1979, Saramago resolves to travel to Portugal, as well as through it. As his country emerges from an authoritarian dictatorship, he traverses his beloved homeland, neglecting its grand 'sights' in favour of Romanesque churches and cobweb-ridden chapels, determined to find belonging in the landscape which went on to inform his greatest works of fiction.

All The Names

A subtle and insightful story about boredom, passion, curiosity and memory from the Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago

A novel that has soul, which Saramago offers to his readers with all his witty, intelligent, tender and magical generosity

Offers an unearthly, muted beauty; a freedom from the obvious, the ideological and trivial; an atmosphere of profound serenity, and a benevolent humor

Both delightful and unsettling which is perhaps the mark of true literature

A tantalizing novel...shifting and teasing, full of metaphorical labyrinths and false trails

It is the marriage of the living and the dying...that so strongly characterizes the writing of Jose Saramago

The Swedish Academy's citation called his novels "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony." It is a description which perfectly captures his latest novel

A subtle and insightful story about boredom, passion, curiosity and memory from the Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago 
 
Senhor José is a lonely civil servant who spends his days labouring in the labyrinthine stacks of Lisbon's central registry. Among the file-cards for the living and the dead, one – of an apparently ordinary woman – will transform his life. Breaking away from his strict routine, José resolves to track the woman down, obsessively following a thread of clues in a bid to rescue her from an oblivion deeper than the grave. 
 
 'When a very good book finds us at just the right moment in life, it can become stitched into our own identity. All the Names – a novel about identity and connection – has become stitched into mine' Samantha Harvey, Independent

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy

The very first novel written by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saramago

Saramago writes beautifully, and his style is ruminative…for those who appreciate finely wrought, meditative prose

H. is a struggling artist with a commission to paint a portrait of a well-known industrialist. Whilst the industrialist sits for the portrait, H. begins an affair with his subject’s secretary. Meanwhile the painting starts to fail. For inspiration H. takes a trip to Italy to contemplate the works of the great artists, but when his friend back home is arrested by the secret police of Salazar’s regime, H. is pulled back to Portugal. Art, sexuality and politics collide in Saramago’s first novel.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

A unique, meditative, funny, politically astute masterpiece by one of Europe's greatest writers

Lovely...a work of fluent and amazing gracefulness

He has created a body of work of luminous power: ironic, intellectually playful, dense and strange

Shows Saramago to be a novelist of the grandest sort...it is a dramatic work of great philosophical weight, filtered through a refined contemplative intelligence

A study in symmetry, possessing a peculiar charm, humour and wisdom uniquely its own

The world's threats are universal like the sun but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow. 
 
Back in Lisbon after sixteen years practising medicine in Brazil, Ricardo Reis wanders the rain-sodden streets. He longs for the unattainably aristocratic Marcenda, but it is Lydia, the hotel chamber maid who makes and shares his bed. His old friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to see him, still wearing the suit he was buried in six weeks earlier. It is 1936, the clouds of Fascism are gathering ominously above them, so they talk; a wonderful, rambling discourse on art, truth, poetry, philosophy, destiny and love.

José Saramago

Margaret Jull Costa

A fluid and imaginative translation by Margaret Jull Costa… A   masterly creation: pessimistic without being bleak, lyrical without being   sentimental… Saramago tears back that curtain to reveal not only the stage on   which life is performed but also backstage, under unflattering working   lights; to show humanity at its most anxious, its most vulnerable and most   true

For admirers of his work...the rescue of this novel from oblivion is something to be grateful for. The translator, Margaret Jull Costa, as ever, does a splendid job

Not only does it illuminate the slow development of a radically original artist, but it is an interesting novel in its own right

This is one of Saramago’s early works but his eye for psychological nuance and his gift for sympathy are already in evidence

Skylight is a deeply affecting novel, the work of an already adroit writer who marshals his characters with assurance

A novel that stands securely on its own merits and is a worthy addition to the rich body of Saramago’s work

Saramago’s insightful writing is a pleasure to be immersed in, as he brings this microcosm of society to life with all the foibles, frustrations and passions of daily life

Lisbon, late-1940s. The inhabitants of an old apartment block are struggling to make ends meet. There’s the elderly shoemaker and his wife who take in a solitary young lodger; the woman who sells herself for money and jewellery; the cultivated family come down in the world; and the beautiful typist whose boss can’t keep his eyes off her. 
 
Poisonous relationships, happy marriages, jealousy, gossip and love – Skylight brings together the joys and grief of ordinary people. One of his earliest novels, it provides an entry into Saramago’s universe but was lost for decades and published, as per his wishes, after his death.

José Saramago

Praise for Skylight

A fluid and imaginative translation by Margaret Jull Costa… A masterly creation: pessimistic without being bleak, lyrical without being sentimental… Saramago tears back that curtain to reveal not only the stage ...

For admirers of his work...the rescue of this novel from oblivion is something to be grateful for. The translator, Margaret Jull Costa, as ever, does a splendid job

Not only does it illuminate the slow development of a radically original artist, but it is an interesting novel in its own right

A fluid and imaginative translation by Margaret Jull Costa… A masterly creation: pessimistic without being bleak, lyrical without being sentimental… Saramago tears back that curtain to reveal not only the stage ...

For admirers of his work...the rescue of this novel from oblivion is something to be grateful for. The translator, Margaret Jull Costa, as ever, does a splendid job

Not only does it illuminate the slow development of a radically original artist, but it is an interesting novel in its own right

A fluid and imaginative translation by Margaret Jull Costa… A masterly creation: pessimistic without being bleak, lyrical without being sentimental… Saramago tears back that curtain to reveal not only the stage ...

For admirers of his work...the rescue of this novel from oblivion is something to be grateful for. The translator, Margaret Jull Costa, as ever, does a splendid job

Not only does it illuminate the slow development of a radically original artist, but it is an interesting novel in its own right

Books by José Saramago

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