Portugal

Now And At the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques, translated into English by Julia Sanches and published by And Other Stories in 2015. I picked this up because it was incorrectly shelved in fiction. It's actually a work based around the author's travels accompanying a palliative care team in northern Portugal. It was intriguing, so I decided to include it alongside a work of fiction. The interview with the couple who had lived in Angola, farming the land until independence; the relationships that sisters Elisa and Sara had with their late father; this book was meaningful and so engaging and the format was distinctive, reflecting the complexity of the feelings around serious ill health.

"Immortal in the morning. At night, the fear of never waking."

As I had read 21st century non-fiction, I afforded myself the luxury of an older Portugese novel that was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa last year. Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, published by Two Lines Press, was a very tactile book with a smooth cover, pleasing typeface and printed on good quality paper. It was an excellent size for ease of reading. The story of a widowed mother, told by a third party, it had its surprises. I had my eye on this book for some time before purchasing it, planned to read it regardless of this scheme to read a book from every country and it didn't let me down. There was a tone of resignation in the narrator's description of events that I particularly liked, that perhaps you might also enjoy.

"When Duarte died, and Dora realized that he was lost forever, it was as if the earth around her shook, and only the tiny scrap of earth beneath her feet remained still. Her world, already sparsely and rather poorly populated, was suddenly deserted. The arrival of Duarte in her life hadn't seen an expansion of her interests, but rather a complete replacement of them."