The explosive and highly controversial 2002 film of "The Crime of Father Amaro" ("El crimen del Padre Amaro") is set in Mexico, in a material and religious culture of this century not unlike the provincial Portugal where, as a young man, Eca de Queir...

This is the seventh volume in the Carcanet's Eca de Queiros programme which includes "The Maias, Cousin Basilio", "The Illustrious House of Ramires", "The City and the Mountains", "The Sin of Father Amaro", "The Yellow Sofa & Three Portraits". Artu...

Solemn, grand, vulnerable – and a little absurd: England in the 1880s. The gentry endures tedious country-bound winter weeks (fashion forbids them from showing their faces in London). Lord Beaconsfield is mourned, and a national legend buried. "The T...

Artur Corvelo inherits a legacy, quits his provincial home town and sets out for the capital. Armed with some poems and a heroic play, he seeks literary renown and entry into fashionable intellectual and social circles. Disillusion follows and he ret...

Returning from Brazil, Bazilio tells his cousin Louisa of the brave new world. His revelation leads to a devastating conclusion. "O Primo Bazilio has a far deeper tragedy than Madame Bovary", wrote Roy Campbell, "because the girl involved is not a bi...

In this brilliant, many-layered novel, Eca chooses an unlikely hero, a half-ruined aristocrat, generous, devious, who takes refuge from decline in writing about the courage of his forebears. This is the story of Ramires, and of the Portugal of Eca's...