Ricardo Reis, a doctor, returns to his native Portugal after 16 year in Brazil. But what kind of doctor is he? Instead of treating patients, he spends hours walking in the rain reciting poetry with his few chosen companions.

When a rift opens up along the border between Spain and France, the Iberian peninsula floats off westward across the Atlantic, a great stone raft. The impact is fundamental, as the North American powers look to acquire a whole new tract of land.

A man knocked on the King's door to ask for a boat. Why the petitioner required a boat, where he was bound for, and who volunteered to crew for him the reader will discover as this short narrative unfolds.

Cipriano and his daughter craft a new line of small ceramic figurines and the Centre orders cast quantities and then recants. Resigned to idleness, Cipriano moves to a soulless megaplex, until late one night he comes across a horrifying secret in the bowels of the artificial city. This is an Orwellian nightmare, a family fable and a love story.

What happens when Deadline M-ximo Afonso, a 38-year-old professor of history, discovers that there is a man living in the same city who is identical to him on every physical detail, but not related by blood at all. And what happens when each of these men attempt to investigate each other's lives?

Shifting back and forth between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this touching book is a mosaic of memories, a gathering together of the fragmented recollections that make up the idea of ones youth. Lust, love, humiliation, aspiration - the raptures and miseries of childhood are beautifully captured.

A city is hit by an epidemic of sudden blindness. The authorities segregate the newly-blind and all who've come into contact with them. It's not long before the criminal element take over, the compound is set on fire and the blind escape.

Saramago's narrative is a secular retelling of the Gospel following the life of Christ from his conception to his crucifixion. By subverting the Gospels, Saramago has written a dark and provocative parable.

Senhor Jose is a minor official in a registry office, with a passion for reconstructing people's lives from the data in archive documents. One woman's file is particularly intriguing. She is dead, and he decides to trace her life backwards, from death to birth. But can he bring her back to life?

When Raimundo Silva, humble proof-reader for a Lisbon publishing house, takes it upon himself to insert a negative into the sentence of a history book, he rewrites history. The effect of this act of insubordination is to make his editor, the voluptuous Dr Maria Sara, fall in love with him.