YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS,THE - Harvill

Back in Lisbon after sixteen years practising medicine in Brazil, Ricardo Reis spends his time in the company of the poet Fernando Pessoa - who will wears the suit in which he was buried a few weeks earlier. Reis's other companions are Marcenda, the girl with the paralysed hand, and his hotel chambermaid, who shares his bed. In Ricardo Reis, Saramago has created one of the most enigmatic characters in modern fiction, a man in touch with every facet of life at a moment in history when every certainty in civilised society is about to be scattered to the winds.