World—Ana Luísa Amaral’s second collection with New Directions—offers a new exhilarating set of poems that convey wonder, bemusement, and an ever-deepening appreciation of life. Weaving the thread that connects the poem to life, World speaks of our immense human perplexity in the face of everything around us and our oneness with it all. As Amaral notes, all of us, “humans and non-humans, are on the same ontological level, the differences being only a matter of perspective. We are all made of the same stuff as dreams—and stars.” Asked about her thoughts on World, Amaral’s peerless translator Margaret Jull Costa replied: “What I take from this collection of poems is a sense of joy in the ordinary—seeing an ant going about its business, or a bee or a fish, or the feeling of sharing a whole history with a particular table, or watching a very ordinary woman sitting on a train playing with the handle of her handbag. World also brings us meditations on colonization, slavery, and whaling. Like the world, it is full of surprises and full of joy and sadness.” These vibrant, exultant poems invite you to share this marvelous world: Yes, all you need (how easy!) is to say yes.

By the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Author of On Earth As It Is Beneath

Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil.In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness. 

About the Author

Most of our English-language books are wonderful works translated from Portuguese by Portuguese-speaking authors. We carry books from all Portuguese-speaking countries, and with so many to choose from, finding the perfect one can sometimes feel overwhelming. We'd love to choose one of our favourites and send it to you!

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The Complete Stories

Fiction by Clarice Lispector

Translated from Portuguese by Katrina Dodson

With a contribution by Benjamin Moser

A monster mender works hard to heal all wounds, but struggles to help a sea serpent who just seems … sad.

Dot is a monster healer. She treats bruises and burns and sore throats and sniffles for all sorts of creatures — dragons, krakens and gryphons included. But when Sea Serpent comes to see her because he’s feeling sad, Dot is stumped! She goes looking for the rarest ingredients to make something to get rid of Sea Serpent’s sad, but the potions and salves don’t help, and Sea Serpent doesn't seem too keen on trying any more exotic teas.

Dot is worried that she’ll never be able to help Sea Serpent feel better. Lately, all she’s brought Sea Serpent has been her own company, and not-at-all-special tea. Does this mean she isn’t a very good monster mender, after all? When Sea Serpent comes to her with an unexpected revelation, Dot learns the healing power of being a true friend.

A gentle (and fantastical!) tale of what it means to support a friend struggling with their mental health, from the award-winning author of Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress and Violet Shrink.

Christine Baldacchino

Ilona Iske

Morris is a little boy who loves using his imagination. But most of all, Morris loves his classroom’s dress-up center and its tangerine dress.

Morris is a little boy who loves using his imagination. He dreams about having space adventures, paints beautiful pictures and sings the loudest during circle time. But most of all, Morris loves his classroom’s dress-up center — he loves wearing the tangerine dress.

But the children in Morris’s class don’t understand. Dresses, they say, are for girls. And Morris certainly isn’t welcome in the spaceship some of his classmates are building. Astronauts, they say, don’t wear dresses.

One day when Morris feels all alone, and sick from the taunts of his classmates, his mother lets him stay home from school. Morris reads about elephants, and puts together a puzzle, and dreams of a fantastic space adventure with his cat, Moo.

Inspired by his dream, Morris paints the incredible scene he saw, and brings it with him to school. He builds his own spaceship, hangs his painting on the front of it and takes two of his classmates on an outer space adventure.

With warm, dreamy illustrations Isabelle Malenfant perfectly captures Morris’s vulnerability and the vibrancy of his imagination. This is a sweetly told story about the courage and creativity it takes to be different.

Christine Baldacchino

Pictures by Isabelle Malenfant

Hardcover

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

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

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

The worldwide bestseller by the author of The Alchemist takes us on a journey back in time, from South America to Holland to Nepal, drawing on the rich experiences of his own life to relive the dreams of a generation that longs for peace. • "A novelist who writes in a universal language." —Los Angeles Times
 
In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who dreams of becoming a writer, and Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find a companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal.

After meeting each other in Amsterdam, she convinces Paulo to join her on a trip aboard the Magic Bus that travels from Amsterdam to Istanbul and across Central Asia to Kathmandu. As they embark on this journey together, Paulo and Karla explore a love affair that awakens them on every level and leads to choices and decisions that will set the course for their lives thereafter.

HER ONLY CRIME WAS TO BE AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN
 
When Mata Hari arrived in Paris she was penniless.  Within months she was the most celebrated woman in the city.
 
As a dancer, she shocked and delighted audiences; as a courtesan, she bewitched the era’s richest and most powerful men.
 
But as paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari’s lifestyle brought her under suspicion. In 1917, she was arrested in her hotel room on the Champs Elysees, and accused of espionage.
 
Told in Mata Hari’s voice through her final letter, The Spy is the unforgettable story of a woman who dared to defy convention and who paid the ultimate price.

hardcover

A lyrical journey through the landscapes of love, exile, and justice

Bridges Beyond Silence is a poetic trilogy that unfolds in three arcs — From Indifference to Love, Release into Grace, and Justice Transfigured — traversing the intimate and the universal as it traces a path from the quiet ache of belonging to the luminous possibility of compassion.

Drawing on his life between the Azores and Canada, between public service and inner reflection, Dr. Mario Silva writes with the clarity of one who has witnessed both the fractures and the resilience of the human spirit. His verses explore how love survives migration, how memory shapes identity, and how justice transforms when grounded in empathy.

At once personal and political, Bridges Beyond Silence invites readers to listen — to the silences between words, to the echoes of history, and to the enduring call of hope that unites us across time and place.

Dr. Mario Silva, PhD (Law), is an international legal scholar, author, and former Canadian MP. Decorated by France, Portugal, and Brazil for his human rights work, he has served in senior diplomatic and tribunal roles. Bridges Beyond Silence is his poetic debut, reflecting a life devoted to justice and human connection.

Cicatrizes written by Dino D’Santiago (language Portuguese) autorretrato/ autobiography 

Metade de um século passou sobre a independência da sua terra ancestral, altura em que o seu pai já emigrara da ilha cabo-verdiana de Santiago para Portugal. Meia centena é também o número de textos que compõem a estreia literária de Dino D’Santiago.

Esta estreia não resulta de uma produção linear, nem nasceu da intenção de se tornar livro, mas germinou de forma orgânica, num processo de escrita e de autoconhecimento que se foi alimentando mutuamente. Escrever foi pedir licença à ancestralidade, voltar às memórias do passado, olhar para o presente e esperançar o futuro.

Ao ser desafiado a publicar o que escreveu, o autor acreditou que a partilha da sua experiência, das suas reflexões sobre o quotidiano, do seu sentir, e também dos seus conflitos e vulnerabilidades, revela aquilo que ele em nenhum momento deixa de ser: o homem comum que, apesar da carreira artística, não abre mão dos papéis de pai, filho, irmão e marido.

Se a pena é a língua da alma, Cicatrizes exprime sem precedentes a natureza íntima do seu criador.

Autor

Dino D’Santiago nasceu Claudino de Jesus Borges Pereira em 1982, em Faro. Filho de pais cabo-verdianos, cedo se envolveu nos movimentos de música urbana globalizada, fundindo os universos do soul e do hip-hop com o batuku e o funaná.
Em nome próprio lançou os álbuns Eu e os Meus (2008), Eva (2013), Mundu Nôbu(2018), Kriola (2020) e BADIU (2021), além de ter colaborado em trabalhos com diversos artistas.
Entre os muitos prémios e distinções que recebeu, destacam-se diversos Play – Prémios da Música Portuguesa, um Globo de Ouro e a nomeação para os Grammy Latinos com a canção «Esperança» (conjuntamente com Criolo e Amaro Freitas).
Fundou os projetos Lisboa Criola e Sou Quarteira, foi considerado uma das cem pessoas afrodescendentes mais influentes do mundo pela MIPAD (Most Influential People of African Descent), é embaixador do Projeto VOAR da UNICEF e presidente da ONGD Mundu Nôbu

Language  Portuguese

Água viva by Clarice Lispector (Language Portuguese)

Revisitação de pontos centrais no universo literário de Clarice Lispector, Água viva é pura incandescência da inventividade e da linguagem. Uma enigmática voz feminina – toda audácia, delírio e sedução – conduz a narrativa. Esta mulher, cujo nome não sabemos, deseja mudar de ofício e tornar-se escritora. Ela é um eu que reivindica a ocupação de um espaço e de um tempo, que se dirige a um tu misterioso e que propõe o ousado alinhamento de humanos e bichos, natureza e linguagem, rumo ao centro da vida, que Clarice perseguiu em todas as suas obras.

Contestando limites e sem cedências à convenção, este livro inaugura um espaço partilhado entre quem escreve e quem lê: nesta mulher, na sua inquietação ou na sua letargia, nas suas fraturas ou nas suas pulsões, reconhecemos uma humanidade em estado bruto. O tom fragmentário é contrariado por uma cadência de demandas e reflexões tão profundamente individuais como peremptoriamente universais. Um livro desconcertante, que oferece uma hipótese de fusão entre escrita e leitura, forma e tema, corpo e pensamento: radicalmente inovador, ao suspender as fórmulas de representação romanesca, e irresistivelmente transgressor, na exposição das costuras da ficção e da voz lírica.

Água viva é um triunfo de Clarice Lispector, que aqui ensaia uma nova escrita de si e do mundo.

English overview

Lispector at her most philosophically radical. A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

Author

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.

She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.

She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.

Written by Maria Isaac, Language Portuguese,

«São as histórias que nos matam, quando não conseguimos abandoná-las, nem mudar quem somos nelas.

» Miguel Godói viveu um casamento feliz, que deveria ter durado para sempre.

Mas acidentes acontecem, as histórias mudam, os heróis também morrem, e até os casamentos felizes chegam ao fim.

Agora sozinho numa vida que não escolheu para si, aprende a conviver com as limitações de um corpo partido e mal emendado, com uma epilepsia peculiar que o tornou num doente crónico, e a fazer sentido do mundo entre as suas memórias imperfeitas.

Numa manhã de inverno, Miguel conhece uma misteriosa criança que o leva até a uma casa desconhecida na Madragoa à procura de respostas sobre o livro enigmático que chegou às suas mãos.

O que lá encontra, porém, são ainda mais perguntas e uma possibilidade inesperada: um novo amor por uma mulher.

Perdido há demasiado tempo no lugar-comum do sofrimento, onde as dores familiares transformam a nostalgia na escolha preferencial, Miguel Godói enfrentará agora a vertigem de alcançar uma esperança até aqui desconhecida.

Autor

Maria Isaac nasceu no Norte de Portugal, numa pequena vila cheia de espaço e onde as pessoas sorriem e falam alto. É autora do livro Onde Cantam os Grilos, finalista do Prémio Fundação Eça de Queiroz 2019, e a voz do podcast literário Palavra. Atualmente, vive em Lisboa, rodeada de livros.

Author: José Eduardo Agualusa, Language: Portuguese,

Plano Nacional de Leitura Livro recomendado para o Ensino Secundário como sugestão de leitura. Félix Ventura escolheu um estranho ofício: vende passados falsos. Os seus clientes - prósperos empresários, políticos, generais, enfim, a emergente burguesia angolana - têm o futuro assegurado. Falta-lhes, porém, um bom passado. Félix fabrica-lhes uma genealogia de luxo e memórias felizes, e consegue-lhes os retratos dos ancestrais ilustres. A vida corre-lhe bem. Uma noite entra-lhe em casa, em Luanda, um misterioso estrangeiro à procura de uma identidade angolana. Então, numa vertigem, o passado irrompe pelo presente e o impossível começa a acontecer. Sátira feroz, mas divertida e bem-humorada, à atual sociedade angolana, O Vendedor de Passados é também (ou principalmente) uma reflexão sobre a construção da memória e os seus equívocos.

Autor

José Eduardo Agualusa nasceu no Huambo, Angola, em 1960. Estudou Agronomia e Silvicultura. Viveu em Lisboa, Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, Berlim — e, atualmente, divide o seu tempo entre Lisboa e a Ilha de Moçambique. Os seus romances têm sido distinguidos com os mais prestigiados prémios nacionais e estrangeiros: "O Vendedor de Passados" ganhou o "Independent", em 2004, e "Teoria Geral do Esquecimento" foi finalista do "Man Booker", em 2016, e vencedor do "Dublin Literary Award". Toda a sua obra literária está publicada na Quetzal. Os seus mais recentes livros são o romance "Mestre dos Batuques" (2024) e a recolha de contos "Quero Ser os Teus Domingos" (2025).

Author: Eça De Queiroz

“Os Maias", o mais importante romance de Eça de Queiroz, escrito em 1888. A história de uma família ao longo de três gerações que culmina na descoberta de um amor incestuoso, converteu-se no mais importante clássico da literatura portuguesa.

Autor

José Maria Eça de Queirós, conhecido como Eça de Queirós ou Eça de Queiroz, (1845-1900). Um dos maiores escritores portugueses de toda a história e considerado o melhor realista português do século XIX. Em 1871, com a colaboração de Ramalho Ortigão, escreveu a novela policial "O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra". Em 1871, Eça de Queirós proferiu em conferência o tema "O Realismo Como Nova Expressão de Arte", no Cassino de Lisboa. Em 1875, publica o romance "O Crime do Padre Amaro", marco inicial do Realismo em Portugal, onde fez uma crítica violenta da vida social portuguesa, denunciando a corrupção do clero e a hipocrisia dos valores burgueses. A crítica social unida à análise psicológica apareceria também no romance "O Primo Basílio", publicado em 1878, em "Mandarim", de 1880, e em "Relíquia", de 1887. Em 1888, foi nomeado cônsul em Paris, ano em que publica "Os Maias", considerado como a sua obra-prima. No romance observou-se uma mudança na atitude irreverente de Eça de Queirós, deixando-se transparecer os mistérios do destino e as inquietações do sentimento, as apreensões da consciência e os desequilíbrios da sensualidade. Surgia então uma nova fase literária, em que Eça deixava transparecer uma descrença no progresso. A partir de então, passou a manifestar a valorização das virtudes nacionais e a saudade da vida no campo, principalmente retratados nos romances "A Ilustre Casa de Ramires" e "A Cidade e as Serras", no conto "Suave Milagre" e em diversas biografias religiosas.