A vibrant tour of Portugal, featuring more than 200 photographs that bring to life one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

In this gorgeous book, writer and photographer Christine Chitnis invites you to celebrate the unique, timeless beauty of Portugal through the stunning designs and hues that define Portugal’s countryside, coast, small towns, and cosmopolitan cities.

This collection features over 200 stunning photographs that illustrate the ways that color and pattern are woven into the very fabric of the country’s culture, history, architecture, and traditions. Each section features insightful essays that explore the artistry of azulejos, the colorful ceramic tiles covering much of Portugal’s architecture; the intricately embroidered details of traditional lavradeira costumes; the rich flavors of Portuguese cuisine, and so much more.

Throughout these vibrant pages, you’ll discover the vivid stories behind each color and pattern, transporting you to the gorgeous fields of Alentejo, the sparkling waters of the Algarve, the busy streets of Lisbon, the lush valleys of the Douro, and beyond.

Join our book club! We are starting our Saudade Book Club and are so excited to discuss, listen and learn alongside you. The themes will range from identity, to immigration, to gender, to race, to love, to heartbreak, to self-help, to aging. All books will have a thread connected to Saudade, either because it’s a Portuguese author, or about a Portuguese immigrant neighbourhood, or a forbidden love, or colonization, or a Canadian novel which has also been translated to Portuguese. Our goal is to host safe spaces where we connect, share, listen, learn and leave inspired. When you buy one session it includes the book and attending the book club event. We will reveal the book a few days after you join. If you already have the book we will give you a credit note towards another book. . Each book will have a Book Club date held at our shop or at another exciting location.  On some book club dates we will be lucky to have the author or a special guest join us. 😍 Let’s be inspired together. ♥️ This is also a great gift!!! You can buy one session for $25 plus shipping or a package of 6 for $140 plus shipping of each book. 4-5 weeks before the date you will receive the book or you can pick up the book at our shop. 

Session 1 Nov 18th 
Session 2 Feb 10th 
Session 3 April 28 
Session 5  June 16th
Session 6  Sept 22

Barnacle Love, Paperback, By Anthony De Sa

Shortlisted for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Like Wayson Choy and David Bezmozgis before him, Anthony De Sa captures, in stories brimming with life, the innocent dreams and bitter disappointments of the immigrant experience.

At the heart of this collection of intimately linked stories is the relationship between a father and his son. A young fisherman washes up nearly dead on the shores of Newfoundland. It is Manuel Rebelo who has tried to escape the suffocating smallness of his Portuguese village and the crushing weight of his mother’s expectations to build a future for himself in a terra nova. Manuel struggles to shed the traditions of a village frozen in time and to silence the brutal voice of Maria Theresa da Conceicao Rebelo, but embracing the promise of his adopted land is not as simple as he had hoped.

Manuel’s son, Antonio, is born into Toronto’s little Portugal, a world of colourful houses and labyrinthine back alleys. In the Rebelo home the Church looms large, men and women inhabit sharply divided space, pigs are slaughtered in the garage, and a family lives in the shadow cast by a father’s failures. Most days Antonio and his friends take to their bikes, pushing the boundaries of their neighbourhood street by street, but when they finally break through to the city beyond they confront dangers of a new sort.

Part of a new travel series, Portugal: The Monocle Handbook is a practical guide that will introduce you to the best the country has to offer as we present our favourite spots across the country. We’ve travelled from north to south (via the islands) to find innovative retailers and traditional ateliers, the chefs turning out the tastiest dishes and the sleekest hotels – not to mention undiscovered beaches and world-leading cultural venues. We even reveal the best neighbourhoods to invest in should you wish to put down roots in this sunny nation, plus the plucky entrepreneurs who’ve already made the move. It’s time to pack your bags for Portugal.

Features: 208 pages, hardcover

Published by: Monocle

Printed in: Italy

Dimensions: 24.1cm x 18.6cm x 2.2cm

Brush up on your Portuguese language skills in 3 months! 

Whether you’re visiting Portugal or simply want to improve your Portuguese vocabulary and grammar, this practical language learning course is packed with learning tips and an audio app that makes learning fun!

Inside this Portuguese language book, you’ll find:

   • “Imitated pronunciation” sections that make unfamiliar Portuguese sounds less daunting to English learners
   • Word lists, key phrases and model sentences that build vocabulary 
   • Three self-assessment sections that allow the learner to engage with their own learning, and exercises follow each grammar lesson, reinforcing what has just been taught
   • Includes two mini bilingual dictionaries, meaning you can check words in both English and Portuguese

Paperback

• Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker's Book Award, 2023 (Short-listed)

This fascinating book uncovers the little-known, surprisingly radical history of the Portuguese immigrant women who worked as night-time office cleaners and daytime “cleaning ladies” in postwar Toronto.

Drawing on union records, newspapers, and interviews, feminist labour historians Susana P. Miranda and Franca Iacovetta piece together the lives of immigrant women who bucked convention by reshaping domestic labour and by leading union drives, striking for workers’ rights, and taking on corporate capital in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. Despite being sidelined within the labour movement and subjected to harsh working conditions in the commercial cleaning industry, the women forged critical alliances with local activists to shape picket-line culture and make an indelible mark on their communities.

Richly detailed and engagingly written, Cleaning Up is an archival treasure about an undersung piece of working-class history in urban North America.

A nova aventura da menina Néveda apresenta-nos a um novo meio de transporte e uma viajem pelas Américas. Do Canadá, passando por alguns lugares nos Estados Unidos, México, Brasil e terminando no Uruguai, a Néveda aprende sobre lugares, arte e muita cultura em geral.

conto/story: Terry Costa
ilustração/illustration: Vera Bettencourt

With this highly anticipated new novel, the author of the bestselling Life of Pi returns to the storytelling power and luminous wisdom of his master novel.

The High Mountains of Portugal is a suspenseful, mesmerizing story of a great quest for meaning, told in three intersecting narratives touching the lives of three different people and their families, and taking us on an extraordinary journey through the last century. We begin in the early 1900s, when Tomás discovers an ancient journal and sets out from Lisbon in one of the very first motor cars in Portugal in search of the strange treasure the journal describes. Thirty-five years later, a pathologist devoted to the novels of Agatha Christie, whose wife has possibly been murdered, finds himself drawn into the consequences of Tomás's quest. Fifty years later, Senator Peter Tovy of Ottawa, grieving the death of his own beloved wife, rescues a chimpanzee from an Oklahoma research facility and takes it to live with him in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, where the strands of all three stories miraculously mesh together.
     Beautiful, witty and engaging, Yann Martel's new novel offers us the same tender exploration of the impact and significance of great love and great loss, belief and unbelief, that has marked all his brilliant, unexpected novels.

Paperback Edition

E se a verdadeira história de Rabo de Peixe for ainda mais rocambolesca do que aquela que é contada na série da Netflix?

No dia 6 de junho de 2001, Antonino Giuseppe Quinci, o protagonista da história que mudou o destino de várias gerações de rabopeixenses, aportou na vila, depois de ter escondido, pela costa de São Miguel, mais de 700 quilos de cocaína.

O açoriano Rúben Pacheco Correia empreendeu uma longa viagem à procura da verdade dos factos, assim como dos protagonistas de carne e osso, da história que inspirou a série. Sem saber até onde o iria levar a investigação a que se dedicou durante quase dois anos e que o fez viajar até à Itália e ao Brasil, o autor, conhecido gastrónomo e comentador televisivo, partiu com o desígnio de fazer justiça à verdade e também à vila onde nasceu em 1997.

Passados mais de vinte anos, o país e o mundo podem, finalmente, conhecer o rosto dos protagonistas reais e as suas histórias, inéditas e peculiares, que se desenrolaram naquele trágico ano e que mudaram, para sempre, o destino de Rabo de Peixe.

Será que, realmente, as pessoas panaram peixe com a cocaína do traficante italiano? Fizeram linhas de campo de futebol com a droga? Houve, de facto, algum padre que sofreu uma overdose? E, afinal, quem era e onde está o protagonista de todo este desastre? Como fugiu da prisão? E quem são os demais envolvidos nesta história?

Neste livro, Rúben Pacheco Correia leva o leitor a sentir-se parte da investigação, fá-lo vibrar a cada pista conseguida, levantar voo a cada viagem, e concluir que, nesta história, a realidade supera mesmo a ficção.

Pessoa’s best known works and poems.

From celebrated author Anthony De Sa comes a raw and compelling novel of love, war and the heartbreaking effects of memory.

"'You must listen to my words. You must promise to tell my story the way I have shared it with you.'"

Tanzania, 1956. A Maasai woman gives birth to a child with albinism. The child is seen as a curse upon her tribe, and so begins Pó's tumultuous story. As Pó navigates the world, she must claim her life in the face of violence and ostracism.

Further south, in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique, Ezequiel struggles for acceptance too. Adopted by missionaries, he is not recognized by his Portuguese father's community, or by his Makonde mother's tribe. When civil war erupts, he must choose who to fight for and who to leave behind.

Pó and Zeca come together in a time of momentous change. Love connects these two outsiders, forcing them to confront the shattering impact of colonialism and war. Children of the Moon is a stunning and unforgettable exploration of the love of two people at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control.

Paperback Edition

Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heteronyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this “most multifarious of writers” (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer—but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match.

Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet’s life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius.

Much as Nobel laureate José Saramago brought a single heteronym to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa’s imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. A solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic love affair, Pessoa used his and his heteronyms’ writings to explore questions of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated Portugal.

Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he spent nine years as a child. Zenith re-creates the drama of Pessoa’s adolescence—when the first heteronyms emerged—and his bumbling attempts to survive as a translator and publisher. Zenith introduces us, too, to Pessoa’s bohemian circle of friends, and to Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters. Pessoa reveals in equal force the poet’s unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa’s posthumous literary achievements—especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet.

A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa simultaneously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa’s work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.

Paperback

Lisbon 1943. As two American librarians are drawn into a city of dangerous subterfuge and unexpected love affairs, they are forced to choose between their missions and the men they love. Brimming with evocative writing and meticulous research, award-winning author Suzanne Nelson spins a web of secret aliases, sweeping romance, and great sacrifice. Inspired by real historical figures, this is the captivating story of two remarkable young women, their bravery and heartache, and a friendship that withstands the ravages of war.

With World War Two raging across Europe, best friends Selene Delmont and Beatrice Sullivan are enlisted by the U.S. Intelligence Office and sent to Lisbon—a sparkling city and hotbed of trouble, harboring exiled royalty, hunted refugees, and spies trading double-edged secrets in seductively dark corners. In official capacity, librarians Selene and Bea have been recruited to catalog the vast mountain of information gathered by the Allies, but by night, both women are undercover agents tasked with infiltrating the Axis spy network.

Where Selene is confident and brash, Bea is bookish and careful. Selene longs to escape her family’s impossible expectations and embrace her independence, while all Bea wants is to heal from heartbreak and keep impulsive Selene out of trouble. But soon, both librarians are caught up in treacherous games of deception alongside two of Lisbon’s most notorious men—the outcast Portuguese baron, Luca Caldeira, and the lethal double-agent, Gable. As Selene charms her way through lavish ballrooms and fêtes with Luca, Bea is plunged into Gable’s shadowy underworld of informants. Victory depends upon the joint success of their missions, but when an unexpected betrayal throws a carefully spun web of lies into chaos, everything they’ve sacrificed is put at risk. As Selene and Bea are pushed to their breaking points can their friendship, and their hearts, survive the cost of war?

Written by Jose Saramago, translated by 

A wry, fictional account of the life of Christ by the Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, “Illuminated by ferocious wit, gentle passion, and poetry” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). For José Saramago, the life of Jesus Christ and the story of his Passion were things of this earth: a child crying, a gust of wind, the caress of a woman half asleep, the bleat of a goat or the bark of a dog, a prayer uttered in the grayish morning light. The Holy Family reflects the real complexities of any family, but this is realism filled with vision, dream, and omen. Saramago’s deft psychological portrait of a savior who is at once the Son of God and a young man of this earth is an expert interweaving of poetry and irony, spirituality and irreverence. The result is nothing less than a brilliant skeptic’s wry inquest into the meaning of God and of human existence.

About Author

JOSE SARAMAGO is one of the most acclaimed writers in the world today. He is the author of numerous novels, including All the Names, Blindness, and The Cave. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Giovanni Pontiero (10 February 1932 - 10 February 1996) was a British scholar and translator of Portuguese fiction, most notably the works of José Saramago. His translation of the Saramago work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was awarded the Teixeira-Gomes Prize for Portuguese translation.

Push for Happy: An Interactive Emotional Awareness + Regulation Children's Book

Push for Happy is an interactive emotional intelligence, awareness, and regulation book. It prompts children to label feelings, emotional triggers, and to put themselves into the storybook along the way. Children create their own character, drawing out body scans, by illustrating how they experience the feeling and where they feel it in their body. Children draw their triggers while thinking about how to regulate their emotions and considering the characters’ experiences.

This book was created by Tania DaSilva, a child, and youth therapist, it allows children to create a one-of-a-kind storybook, making themselves one of the main characters! It follows four friends throughout their day and their emotional ups and downs, the biggest lesson being emotions aren’t permanent and awareness helps us regulate. 

A masterwork about backcountry life by one of Brazil's most celebrated novelists.

Paulo Honório is a sometime field hand who has kicked and clawed and schemed his way to prosperity, becoming master of the decrepit estate São Bernardo, where once upon a time he toiled. He is ruthless in his exploitation of his fellow man, but when he makes a match with a fine young woman, he is surprised to discover that this latest acquisition, as he sees it, may be somewhat harder to handle. It is in Paulo Honório’s own rough-hewn voice that the great Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, often compared to William Faulkner, tells this gritty and dryly funny story of triumph and comeuppance, a tour de force of the writer’s art that is beautifully captured in Padma Viswanathan’s new translation.

Paperback