Author(s): Jose Saramago (tr from Portuguese Margaret Jull Costa)

Fiction

Review Quotes: "The teensiest bit of plot is meaningfully, accessibly stretched into something enormous." "We'll say it again: Saramago is the finest novelist, bar none." "A densely textured, wonderfully resonant reworking of Plato's allegory." "Arguably the greatest writer of our time. He throw[s] a dazzling flash of lightning on his subjects." "Saramago says he is really an essayist who took to writing novels. This is true. But the novels are masterly." "Saramago's long fluid sentences, richly stocked with folk wisdom, lend his novels a rare quality of permanence." "A compassionate study of loyalty, love and the ways in which people face the forces trying to obliterate their spirit." "Loving collaboration that insists on the value of independence and a firm belief that art can't be separated from life." "What truly elevates-- is Saramago's style; this fantastically agile, irrepressibly funny, sympathetic, cerebral, and sometimes even corny voice." "A gripping, beautifully written, utterly enchanting, archaically romantic, and, at times, devastating take on ordinary people struggling to survive." Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Mar