{"title":"Books by Antonio Lobo Antunes","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780300233414","title":"By the Rivers of Babylon","description":"A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers  “One of the essential writers of our tormented times.”—Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement   “Little prepares one for this extraordinary book, in which each chapter, covering a single day, and lasting a single sentence, offers a teeming stream of consciousness. . . . Even pain is alive, and alive is the word for this book, alive and enduring.”— Michael Autrey, Booklist   Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumor, the narrator, António, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people who passed through it. He recalls the village where he lived as a child near the Mondego River amid the eucalyptus and pines, his parents and grandparents and their tight-knit community of potato farmers and tungsten miners, and the woman he loved—an unexpected polyphony of voices and places sounding in sharp counterpoint to debilitating pain.     By the Rivers of Babylon conjures the past and the present all at once, revealing the power of memory to embolden us in the face of extraordinary suffering. This is António Lobo Antunes’s homage to the beauty of a cherished life in its confrontation with imminent death.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56232025522549,"sku":"9780300233414","price":16.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300233414_f35d9603-845b-4df5-bedb-c6271fd4ad0f.jpg?v=1786012224"},{"product_id":"9781628976120","title":"Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach","description":"A polyphonic novel set over the course of three days, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach is a stunning meditation on memory and time from Antonio Lobo Antunes, considered by many to be Portugal’s greatest living writer.   The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios.   Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator’s corrosive psyche toward our real destination—the place inside herself where the family’s grief-stricken secrets are kept.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302253638005,"sku":"9781628976120","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781628976120_5363c12e-bc83-4e1b-b094-724fdf69e8a9.jpg?v=1786023647"},{"product_id":"9781628975079","title":"Commission of Tears","description":"António Lobo Antunes's twenty-fifth novel, Commission of Tears (2011, Comissão das Lágrimas) is set during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002). Angola attained official independence on November 11, 1975 and, while the stage was set for transition, a combination of ethnic tensions and international pressures rendered Angola's hard-won victory problematic.  As with many post-colonial states, Angola was left with both economic and social difficulties which translated into a power struggle between the three predominant liberation movements.  The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), formed in December of 1956 as an offshoot of the Angolan Communist Party, had as its support base the Ambundu people and was largely supported by other African countries, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.\u003cbr\u003eIn this novel, Lobo Antunes delves into this traumatic period of Angola's history through the fragmented memories and dreams of a broken woman. The author drew from the story of the commander of the female battalion MPLA (Popular movement for the liberation of Angola) who was tortured and killed following the state coup of May 1977. It is said that while they tortured her she did not stop singing. This is the story of Cristina, admitted in to a psychiatric clinic in Lisbon. In her torrent of memories, dialogues and traumatic episodes, Cristina remembers her early childhood in Africa, at the time when everything inside her head was intertwined with her father´s voice, who was a former Black priest and became one of the torturers of the \"Commission of Tears.\" Cristina's white mother, a cabaret dancer imported from Lisbon to entertain Portuguese farmers in Angola, marries the Black ex-priest because she finds herself pregnant with Cristina by her the man who exploits her, the cabaret manager. The long, twisting narrative weaves together the three voices of daughter, father, and mother as they recall the terrors of their life in Angola, and their own suffering. Their personal tragedies, scarred by racism and abuse, mirror those of the country that is being torn asunder around them.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304267821429,"sku":"9781628975079","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781628975079_b437c703-f884-416a-8005-e88d8c52b423.jpg?v=1786023637"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-antonio-lobo-antunes.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}