Raised from the Ground

Jose Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922 in the small rural village of Azinhaga, he was in his fifties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar & Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, which included plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and over a dozen novels, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in June 2010.

"Time now gives us English-speakers the chance to see how well he worked to serve and deserve such greatness in this early novel" -- Ursula K Le Guin Guardian "Here Saramago has begun to develop a unique voice which swoops and dives on his own work like a bird (and which is captured with all the skill of a ventriloquist in Margaret Jull Costa's excellent translation)" -- Nick Caistor Times Literary Supplement "By Saramago's own reckoning it was the book in which he found and developed his style. a novel that resounds with relevance for our own time" -- Steven Heighton Scotsman "This is a rich novel about a family of landless agricultural workers struggling over four generations. Readers of Jose Saramago will not be surprised at this original combination of serious denunciation of injustice with sarcasm and humour. Such an allusive novel, with its own orthodoxy in punctuation and subtle shifts of tone, is especially hard to translate. It reads beautifully well" -- Michael Eaude Independent "A torrent of storytelling delivered with a lively, humorous immediacy, where his narrative drive and digressive thoughts flow unimpeded by conventional punctuation restraints" -- Siobhan Murphy Metro