António Lobo Antunes is the major Portuguese novelist of his generation, and this novel — set partly in the north of Portugal during and after the Salazar dictatorship — captures the weight of recent Portuguese history on the lives of ordinary people. The prose is dense and fragmented, deliberately disorienting, and exactly suited to its subject.
Reading Lobo Antunes before visiting northern Portugal will reshape what you see. The ordinary houses, the riverbank, the Atlantic light — all carry a different charge when you understand the history he is working with.