Books by José Saramago

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.

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.

Saramago's Jesus is the son not of God but of Joseph. 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.

From the misty mountains of the north to the southern seascape of the Algarve, the travels of Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago are a passionate rediscovery of his own land.

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.

After killing his brother Abel, Cain must wander for ever.Written in the last years of Saramago's life, Cain wittily tackles many of the moral and logical non sequiturs created by a wilful, authoritarain God, forming part of Saramago's long argument with God and recalling his provocative novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

For two years Solomon the elephant has lived in Lisbon. 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.

En bilist standser for rødt. Og da lyset skifter, rører han sig ikke. Han er pludselig blevet blind. Et venligt medmenneske hjælper bilisten med at komme hjem. Næste dag er også hjælperen blevet blind. Det er begyndelsen på en uforklarlig epedemi, som snart fører til kaos, rædsel og brutalitet. Det ukendte og skræmmende sætter mekanismer i gang, som fjerner dannelsens tynde fernis. Men til trods for blindheden er der dog stadig nogen, der 'ser' og forsøger at samle de gode kræfter. José Saramagos roman kan læses som en fabel, en realistisk fantasi med stærke politiske undertoner. Men heller ikke i denne sammenhæng mangler livet de bizarre sider, humoren og de overraskende vendinger, der er typiske for Saramagos fortællemåde. Modtager af Nobelprisen i litteratur i 1998. Pressen skriver: »Romanen hører til det absolut bedste fra den gamle mesters hånd.« – Thomas Thurah, Information »Måske Saramagos vigtigste og mest interessante bog. Hans sprog er det rigeste, mest indfaldsrige og fantasifulde, der skrives inden for det portugisiske område.« – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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. 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.

A novel that follows the changing fortunes of the Mau-Tempo family - poor, landless peasants not unlike the author's own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal known for its vast agricultural estates, it charts the lives of the Mau-Tempos as national and international events rumble on in the background.

Called 'the book lost and found in time' by its author, Skylight is one of Saramago's earliest novels. The manuscript was lost in the publishers' offices in Lisbon for decades, and is only now being published in English. Lisbon, late-1940s.

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.

A subtle and insightful story about boredom, passion, curiosity and memory from the Nobel Prize-winner Jose SaramagoSenhor Jose is a lonely civil servant who spends his days labouring in the labyrinthine stacks of Lisbon's central registry.

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. His old friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to see him, still wearing the suit he was buried in six weeks earlier.

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.

Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical detail. 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...

"A man went to knock at the king's door and said, Give me a boat. 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..."

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.