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The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
  • Published: 29 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9781860465024
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $24.99

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Formats & editions
EBook
20 Sept 2013
Paperback
29 Oct 2018
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A unique, meditative, funny, politically astute masterpiece by one of Europe's greatest writers

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.
  • Published: 29 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9781860465024
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

José Saramago

JOSÉ DE SOUSA SARAMAGO, (November 1922 - June 2010), was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. More than two million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. He was a founding member of the National Front for the Defense of Culture in Lisbon in 1992, and co-founder with Orhan Pamuk, of the European Writers' Parliament (EWP).
portrait photo of José Saramago

Also by José Saramago

Blindness
The First Boat
An Unexpected Light
The Silence of Water
The Lizard
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
Skylight
See all

Praise for The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

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

Independent

The greatest of his novels

New Statesman

Lovely...a work of fluent and amazing gracefulness

Independent

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

Irish Times

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

Scotsman

A capacious, funny, threatening novel

New York Times Review of Books