Small Memories

The voice of Small Memories is so immediate, genial and full of simple affection for the boy he was, that reading it feels very much like sharing a fireside with a talkative uncle * Guardian *A moving account of his childhood and adolescence…Small Memories will delight – Raymond Carr * The Spectator *A real insight into the making of a great writer * Independent *It’s impossible not to be charmed by this fluid, spontaneous-seeming memoir of boyhood from the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramago […] For all its delightful novelty, however, the childhood described here is also beguilingly universal: the superstitions and terrors, the mysteries and joys * Daily Mail *A powerful and nostalgic memoir * The Times *The great thing about this memoir of boyhood is how unportentous it is for the most part – Michael Kerrigan * Scotsman *The lasting impression left by the self-portrait is of an abiding loneliness, nostalgia, and loss, leavened by humour and an unfeigned humility * Times Literary Supplement *The humiliations and joys of childhood, magnified by time, are delicately revisited – Angel Gurria-Quintana * Financial Times *The elliptical prose style that earned Saramago the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 imbues these snapshots with a sense of time irrecoverably lost as the author, who died earlier this year, reprises the significant episodes of his youth. Any lack of drama will be of little consequence to admirers of Saramago, whose mostly rural vignettes reflect the emotional pitch of an illustrious literary career * Financial Times *

Jose Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.

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