The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis »

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The year: 1936. Europe dances while an invidious dictator establishes himself in Portugal. The city: Lisbon-gray, colorless, chimerical. Ricardo Reis, a doctor and poet, has just come home after sixteen years in Brazil. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Publishers Weekly

Ricardo Reis meets dead Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and encounters two women who may be figments of Pessoa's poetry in this extraordinarily nuanced novel.