When translator Claire Methuen travels back to her hometown of Dinard for a family wedding, she runs into her old piano teacher Madame Ladon. After befriending the ageing woman, Methuen begins to toy with the idea of a permanent return to live in Bri...

"Last Kingdom is a set of books that... is neither philosophical argumentation nor little disparate, scholarly essays, nor novelistic narrative; gradually, for me, all genres have fallen away".   So writes Pascal Quignard of his monumental book serie...

Musician Ann Hidden suspects her partner, Thomas, isn't telling her everything. So one dark night, she secretly follows him to an unfamiliar house in the Paris suburbs, where he disappears inside with an unknown woman. But before she can even begin t...

Not for sale in Estonia! "A Terrace in Rome" describes the tormented life of Geoffroy Meaume, a 17th-century engraver of encrypted shadows and erotic prints. After a passionate affair in his youth concludes with his face being burned by acid thrown...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger has mastered poetry, novels, and the intricate balance between history and fiction, but he's never done anything quite like this before. For the writing of "Unlikely Progeny", Enzensberger developed a persona – Linda Quilt -c...

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...

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...