Pereira Maintains

Pereira has never seen himself as a hero. He's a middle-aged, overweight culture editor for a second-rate newspaper in late 1930s Lisbon. The only things he really cares about are French literature and his dead wife, whose portrait he talks to every day.

Or so he thinks. When he employs a politically active young man as an assistant to write advance obituaries of great writers, his outlook begins to change. Moved by his leftwing assistant's love for life and increasingly disturbed by the repressive regime and state censorship around him, Peirera starts revising his world view.

Despite trying to resist it by going on trips to a spa and a thalassotherapeutic clinic and drowning his sorrows in sugary lemonade and plenty of omelettes, he can't ignore the change that is happening inside of him. Finally, it is an act of brutality that completes his transformation from zero to unlikely hero. And then there is no going back.

Award-winning Italian author Antonio Tabucchi offers a stunning novel that explores one man's moral and political awakening with affectionate humour and great compassion. Patrick Creagh provides an excellent translation of this warm, tender modern classic about human courage in the face of political corruption.