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The Lázaro family are carpenters who would rather be piano-makers. In the dusty back room of their carpentry shop in Lisbon is the 'piano cemetery', filled with broken-down pianos that provide the spare parts needed for repairing and rebuilding instruments all over the city. It is a mysterious and magical place, a place of solace, a dreaming place and, above all, a trysting place for lovers. Peixoto weaves the tragic true story of the marathon-runner, Francisco Lázaro, into a rich narrative of love, betrayal, domestic happiness and dashed hopes.
In a poverty-stricken, rural Portuguese village, two generations of men and women, hardened by hunger, toil, and hardship, are driven by a force beyond themselves to fulfill their assigned roles in an eternal cycle of death and retribution.
This book is a selection from the three books that I published so far. 'A Child in Ruins' is the title of the first of these books. A Crianca em Ruinas (A Child in Ruins), first published in 2001 A Casa, a Escuridao (The House, the Darkness), first published in 2002 Gaveta de Papeis (Drawer of Papers), first published in 2008 The selection of the poems was made by me with some suggestions by Hugo. 'A Child in Ruins' was awarded the Award of the Portuguese Society of Authors for the best poetry book of that year. 'Gaveta de Papeis' was awarded the Daniel Faria Award for poetry. This is the first time 'A Child in Ruins' has been translated into English."
An exquisite novel from Portugal's most acclaimed, prize-winning young novelist. In a village in the Portuguese region of Alentejo, against a background of severe rural poverty, Jose Luis Peixoto weaves a mesmerising tale of men and women hardened by hunger and toilm but prey and to jealousy, violence and the overwhelming power of fate.
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Set in the working-class district of Benfica in Lisbon, The Piano Cemetery tells the story of a family, and especially of the hopes and fears of the fathers who pass the baton of the generations on to their sons. The Lazaro family are cabinet-makers who would rather be piano-makers. They have a carpentry shop in the Benfica district of Lisbon and there at the back is the 'piano cemetery' piled high with broken-down pianos that provide the spare parts needed for repairing pianos all over the city. It is a mysterious and magical place, a place of solace, a dreaming place and, above all, a trysting place for lovers. The Piano Cemetery is a wonderfully accomplished novel in which the true story ...
Our Musseque is a tale of growing up in one of the vibrant shanty towns (musseques) of Luanda during the 1940s and 1950s. Weaving back and forwards through his half-remembered childhood, the narrator draws us into a close-knit world of labourers, shopkeepers, drunks, prostitutes and determined women battling to bring up their families, as Angola hurtles towards the beginning of its armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Meanwhile the children laugh, play, squabble and fight, puzzle at racial taunts and move rapidly through adolescence towards sexual awakening and a greater awareness of political realities around them. Written in prison in 1961-62 but not published until over 40 years later, the novel is shot through with a sense of nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood and a community swept away by the encroaching city, together with the exhilaration, hopes and fears for what is about to come.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERVienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, sits in the waiting room of the city's preeminent psychiatrist as he anxiously ponders the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis. When the enigmatic, intensely beautiful Hettie Bull walks in, Lysander is immediately drawn to her, unaware of how destructive the consequences of their subsequent affair will be. One year later, home in London, Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous web of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies that is slowly, steadily, permeating every corner of his life...
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.
A latest quarterly anthology by the two-time National Magazine Award-winning literary journal features entries by forefront and up-and-coming writers, as well as an eccentric design.