Five books that put you in Portugal. Four are by writers from Portugal and set there, starting with Baltasar and Blimunda and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. The other is a wider pick, by someone who knows the place well.
Portugal's most celebrated modern writer is José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. The national epic is The Lusiads, published by Luís de Camões in 1572, which recounts Vasco da Gama's voyage to India. Poetry goes back further still, to the medieval troubadour songs known as cantigas. In the twentieth century, writers worked under the Salazar dictatorship, which ended with the revolution of 1974, and state censorship shaped what could be printed.
Saramago's novels are translated from Portuguese and often turn to the country's past. Baltasar and Blimunda is set in eighteenth-century Portugal under João V, with the Inquisition and the building of the Mafra convent. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis sends a returning exile through Lisbon in 1936, as Salazar's dictatorship hardens. Blindness sets an allegorical epidemic in an unnamed city.
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Set in 18th-century Portugal under João V, it shows the Inquisition, the building of Mafra convent and the lives of ordinary people.
Follows a returning exile through Lisbon in 1936, capturing Salazar's rising dictatorship, the city's streets and Pessoa's ghost.
An allegorical epidemic in an unnamed city, but Saramago's Portuguese voice and social critique are strong; place is deliberately unspecific.
Set in 1506 Lisbon during the forced conversion and massacre of Jews, it shows the city's religious violence.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Portugal.
A Swiss teacher follows a Portuguese doctor's writings through Lisbon and the memory of resistance under Salazar's dictatorship.
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