Margaret Jull Costa

"Superabundant talent, stunning originality, an elegant way with words... The Zahir is something more."

— Los Angeles Times

The narrator of The Zahr is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years, Esther, is a war correspondent who has disappeared along with a friend, Mikhail, who may or may not be her lover.

Was

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"A previously unpublished novel by a literary master, Skylight tells the intertwined stories of the residents of a faded apartment building in 1940s Lisbon. Silvestre and Mariana, a happily married elderly couple, take in a young nomad, Abel, and soon discover their many differences. Adriana loves Beethoven more than any man, but her budding sexuality brings new feelings to the surface. Carmen left Galicia to marry humble Emilio, but hates Lisbon...

Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Bible through the story of Cain. Condemned to wander forever after he kills Abel, he is whisked around in time and space, where he witnesses repeated incidents that seem to prove the cruelty of an unjust God.

"The story of a mysterious woman named Athena, told by the many who knew her well--or hardly at all."--Cover.

"A woman around her thirties begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody's eyes, she has a perfect life: a solid and stable marriage, a loving husband, sweet and well-behaved children and a job as a journalist she can't complain about. However, she can no longer bear the necessary effort to fake happiness when all she feels in life is an enormous apathy. All that changes when she encounters an ex-boyfriend from her...

At the Cannes Film Festival, a successful, driven entrepreneur goes to the darkest lengths to reclaim a lost love. Captured in all their crassness are producers, actors, aspiring starlets, supermodels, and notorious fashionistas, whose lives and actions hold sway over millions.

The Nobel Prize–winning author of Blindness recalls the days of his youth in Lisbon and the Portuguese countryside in this charming memoir.
José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside...

A dreamer petitions his king for a boat—and gets more than he bargained for—in “this richly enigmatic short story” by the Nobel Prize-winning author (Kirkus).

“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. But the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered

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Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere, nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric, once-successful film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel's voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost; and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel...

A companion to the inspirational classic The Alchemist is filled with timeless stories of reflection and rediscovery.