Skylight

In 1953, José Saramago submitted a novel to his publishers. Thirty-six years later, he heard back

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

A proofreader tinkering with a historical text opens up a world of ambiguity and invention

Marvellous, seriously witty, erotic and edgily surreal

Saramago is one of Europe's most original and remarkable writers...his writing is imbued with the spirit of comic enquiry, meditative pessimism and a quietly transforming energy that turns the indefinite into the unforgettable

This cryptic, ingenious novel...is never dull or humourless... No candidate for [the Nobel Prize] has a better claim to lasting recognition than this novelist who was born in 1922 but was in his mid-50s before he started to publish the fiction that has won him an international reputation

A book filled with lyrical and intellectual rewards

This hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination

Saramago is an extraordinarily talented artist, the type of playwright, novelist, essayist and occasional poet irresistible to lovers of literature

What happens when the facts of history are replaced by the mysteries of love? 
 
When Raimundo Silva, a lowly proofreader for a Lisbon publishing house, inserts a negative into a sentence of a historical text, he alters the whole course of the 1147 Siege of Lisbon. Fearing censure he is met instead with admiration: Dr Maria Sara, his voluptuous new editor, encourages him to pen his own alternative history. As his retelling draws on all his imaginative powers, Silva finds – to his nervous delight – that if the facts of the past can be rewritten as a romance then so can the details of his own dusty bachelor present.

Baltasar & Blimunda

An intense and surreal romance set against the politics of eighteenth-century Lisbon from Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago

In early eighteenth-century Lisbon, Baltasar returns from war missing a hand and searching for purpose. 
 
In Lisbon, Baltasar meets Blimunda, a young woman gifted with visionary sight. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where women are burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by love of an unassailable strength. 
 
Together with the eccentric priest Bartolomeu Lourenço, they attempt to build a flying machine powered by human will. But as the trio pursue Bartolomeu’s impossible – not to mention heretical – dream of flight, the Inquisition watches closely.

A mighty novel, variously bawdy, elevated, angry and tender, combining erudition, comedy, heresy, surreal science fiction and countless good stories.

Original and brilliant...Lovers of Marquez and magical realism will be enchanted by the wonders of this novel, for the colour and vivacity of Saramago's imagination inspires and entertains.

Jose Saramago affirms the simple truths as only a writer of rare stature can.

In early eighteenth-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost his left hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where women are burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by love of an unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the Crown and the Church clash, they purse his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.

The Cave

By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 'a novel with impact. . . hope and charm' Independent

What distinguishes the book is the concern Saramago breathes over his characters; like potter's clay, they are patiently moulded into their best shape, retaining soft marks of memory

Saramago surprises us by bringing hos characters into close focus with his wise insights on the complexity of human relationships and the psychology of close family ties

There are certain writers who will deliver something special with each new book, and Jos- Saramago is one of them

Saramago resolves the story with the same charm that characterises the whole book...he advocates a simpler life based on family and 'the small miracles of love'. He does so with humility, but also with implacable conviction

A quietly unsettling yet also charming tale. The atmosphere and story are pure Orwell, but Saramago's southern Europe rhythms and colour-soaked imagery link him even more firmly to a gritty yet dreamlike magic realism

Saramago can transform banal sentiments into unexpected profundities

Cipriano Algor, an ageing potter, lives with his daughter and her husband in the shadow of the Centre, a nebulous, constantly expanding conglomerate that provides his livelihood – until it decrees that it is no longer interested in his humble wares. Together with his daughter, they craft a new line of small ceramic figurines and, to their bafflement, the Centre orders vast quantities. But once the figures are complete, the Centre recants: there is no market for them. Resigned to idleness Cipriano moves into the soulless megaplex, until late one night he comes across a horrifying secret in the bowels of the artificial city.

Raised from the Ground

Published for the first time in English, this deeply autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer José Saramago tells the powerful story of the Mau-Tempo family.

This deeply personal work, follows the changing fortunes of the Mau-Tempo family – poor, landless peasants not unlike the author’s own grandparents. Saramago charts the lives of the family in Alentjo, southern Portugal, as national and international events rumble on in the background – the coming of the republic in Portugal, the First and Second World Wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazar's life. Yet, nothing seriously impinges on the farm labourers' lives until the first stirrings of communism.

Death at Intervals

'Death at Intervals is a delight: witty, clever, humane, light in tone, profoundly serious in matter' - Scotsman

In the craft of the sentence, José Saramago is one of the great originals... no one writes quite like Saramago, so solicitous and yet so magnificently free. He works as though cradling a thing of magic

Saramago has a light, graceful, ironic touch... the paraphernalia of magical realism

The author's eccentric voice is as engaging as ever... a fitting cap to a body of work as playful as it is wise

With characteristic dry wit he proceeds to debunk the rosy romance of eternal life

A compelling work by a fine writer ... the unique Saramagoan style ... gives the impression of a thought experiment to which the writer is merely a catalyst.  That impression is a carefully crafted one: true art conceals its art, wrote Ovid

This is a beautifully constructed novel, the tone detached, ironic and playful, perfectly maintained throughout

A fable-like tale which tips our world on its axis ... a beautiful book, which narrows down with elegance and assurance from wide-screen satire to a deeply strange love story, all the time probing the human condition with gentle compassion

A genial mix of satire, fantasy and the comically prosaic

I wish more novelists writing in English exhibited this much intellectual ambition, and this much humanity and elegance in realising it

In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Soon, though, the residents begin to suffer. Undertakers face bankruptcy, the church is forced to reinvent its doctrine, and local 'maphia' smuggle those on the brink of death over the border where they can expire naturally. 
 
Death does return eventually, but with a new, courteous approach – delivering violet warning letters to her victims. But what can death do when a letter is unexpectedly returned?

The Elephant's Journey

A delightful historical fable based on a true story about an Indian elephant, who, in obedience to the absurd caprice of a sixteenth-century monarch, travels from Lisbon to Vienna

It is extremely funny. Old Saramago writes with a masterfully light hand, and the humour is tender, a mockery so tempered by patience and pity that the sting is gone though the wit remains vital... a series of contained miracles of absurdity, quiet laughter rising out of a profound, resigned, affectionate wisdom

José Saramango wrote his final book with great panache

Here is a book as serious as it is charming; amid its ironies runs a sustained pleas for the subversive workings of the imagination: "every elephant contains two elephants, one who learns what he's being taught and another who insists on ignoring it all". Thank goodness for that'

Here he has seized the opportunity to turn an unlikely tale of a transalpine hike into something far larger even than its elephantine subject.

The novel has a charming fairy tale quality, with its kings and courtiers, it pachyderm protagonist and his mysterious mahout: this is amoung the most charming of Saramago's works

A playful, intellectual, very European novel, at times if feels reminiscent of Kafka in his lighter moments

In laconic prose, Saramago skilfully builds a journey of delicious digressions that set up resonances from Miguel de Cervantes' picaresque chivalries to Czech humorist Jaroslav Hasek's pigeon - fancying soldier Schweik - all delivered with a jocular pedantry that satirises pomp and grand designs'

It's an epic ramble that the Nobel Prize-winning author saw as a metaphor for life

Saramago enjoys filling out the details with improvisatory skill and imagination

The Elephant's Journey is well worth picking up

For two years Solomon the elephant has lived in Lisbon. Now King Dom João III wishes to make him a wedding gift for a Hapsburg archduke in Vienna. The only way for Solomon to get to his new home is to walk. So begins a journey that will take the stalwart elephant across the dusty plains of Castile, over the sea to Genoa and up to northern Italy where, like Hannibal's elephants before him, he must cross the snowy Alps. Based on a true story, Saramago’s tale is an enchanting mix of fact, fable and fantasy.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Saramago's ingenious fictionalised account of the life of Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth grows up burdened by guilt and destiny. 
 
Set in first-century Judea under Roman rule, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ reimagines the life of Jesus. 
 
Saramago's Jesus is the son not of God but of Joseph. Mary Magdalene is his lover not his convert. In the wilderness he tussles not with the Devil, a kindly and necessary evil, but with God, a fallible, power-hungry autocrat. And he must die not for the sins of the fathers but for the sins of the Father. 
 
By investigating these simple inversions Saramago has woven a dark parable; a secular gospel of astonishing richness and depth. 
 
‘An original, wild, and beautiful book’ Times Literary Supplement

Saramago's Jesus is the son not of God but of Joseph. Mary Magdalene is his lover not his convert. In the wilderness he tussles not with the Devil – a kindly and necessary evil – but with God, a fallible, power-hungry autocrat. And he must die not for the sins of the fathers but for the sins of the Father. By investigating these simple inversions Saramago has woven a dark parable; a secular gospel of astonishing richness and depth. 
 
‘An original, wild and beautiful book’ Times Literary Supplement

Seeing

What happens when voter apathy dismantles democracy altogether? Saramago's gripping novel investigates

He writes with wit, with heartbreaking dignity, and with the simplicity of a great artist in full control of his art. Let us listen to a true elder of our people, a man of tears, a man of wisdom

A brilliant, cruelly ironic, surreal exposé of what we think of as civil society

Saramago portrays an instantly recognisable world in which our political masters bang on about democracy while pursuing policies without any regard to the normal standards of law and basic morality, but in this dense, dark and occasionally brutal book he never forgets the satirist's duty to be funny

This is political satire delivered with rare intellectual gravitas

The narrative voice is impressively uncompromising

Despite the heavy rain, the officer at Polling Station 14 finds it odd that by midday on National Election day, only a handful of voters have turned out. Puzzlement swiftly escalates to shock when the final count reveals seventy per cent of the votes are blank. National law decrees the election should be repeated but the result is even worse. The authorities, seized with panic, decamp from the capital and declare a state of emergency. When apathy and disillusionment renders an entire democratic system useless what happens next?

Blindness

A chillingly powerful dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers

Extraordinary...a tour de force of thought-experiment and feeling-experiment

This is a shattering work by a literary master...a book of real stature

Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet.

He writes a prose of particularly luminous intensity, brilliantly rendered into English by his regular translator Giovanni Pontiero...Sweepingly ambitious

Blistering, unrelenting, horrifying, yet still somehow luminously redemptive

No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order. 
 
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers. 
 
 A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. 
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. 
 
This is not anarchy, this is blindness. 
 
‘Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet’ Independent

(Enemy)

The Double

Wherein lies our identity? An existential thriller and work of literature that takes on the essential questions of life

Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical detail. 
 
What begins as curiosity quickly hardens into obsession. Tertuliano tracks down his double, only to find a man whose existence destabilises his own identity entirely. 
 
Saramago's novel explores the nature of individuality and examines the fear and insecurity that arise when our singularity comes under threat. For in this tense psychological literary thriller, the discovery of a double does not divide one life into two, it reveals that it was never singular to begin with.

A Borgesian fable with a marvellous flavour all its own

A comic and profound exploration of the self... A uniquely seductive writer

The Double is Saramago at his most practised and polished. It is philosophy and thriller rolled into one

Indebted to Borges and with a nod to Auster, he manages to surpass both with the audacity and sheer erudition of his prose

In the pacy denouement the consequences of the hero's actions are played out with surprising deftness... [An] extraordinarily bold and peculiar romance

Written with gusto, wit an imaginative energy...an urgent and topical masterpiece

Thought-provoking, scrupulously constructed and narrated with buoyant high spirits

Cleverly written and left me with lots to think about...a very good book

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 individuality and examines the fear and insecurity that arise when our singularity comes under threat, when even a wife cannot tell the original from the imposter...

The Tale of the Unknown Island

A wonderful and witty book, part folk fable, part philosophical tale, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature and the greatest Portuguese writer of his time.

Saramago writes possibly the most beautiful but certainly the most precise and differentiated Portuguese prose of our time

Saramago is a writer, like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any improbability to life

No candidate for a Nobel Prize has a better claim to lasting recognition than this novelist

He was the equal of Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile - he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy

Saramago is a writer of formidable talent and extraordinary imagination

To speak of the novels of José Saramago is to speak of the sheer pleasure of reading

José Saramago (Author) 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.

"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 by the door for favours (favours being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking on the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear..." 
 
Why the petitioner required a boat, where he was bound for, and who volunteered to crew for him and what cargo it was found to be carrying the reader will discover as this short narrative unfolds. And at the end it will be clear that what night appear to be a children's fable is in fact a wry, witty Philosophical Tale that would not have displeased Voltaire or Swift.

José Saramago

Margaret Jull Costa

Written in the last years of Saramago's life, Cain is a controversial and witty story of a wilful, authoritarian God. 
 
After killing his brother, Cain is condemned to wander the earth. As he moves through time, he encounters moments from the Old Testament – acts of faith, violence and divine judgement that he cannot accept without question. Cain is José Saramago’s bold, darkly playful reimagining of a biblical outcast. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

José Saramago

Books by José Saramago

Series by José Saramago

Brief Encounters

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