Small Memories

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

Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman

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

Times Literary Supplement

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

Raymond Carr, The Spectator

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

Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times

A real insight into the making of a great writer

Independent

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

Daily Mail

A powerful and nostalgic memoir

The Times

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

Financial Times

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

Guardian