Showing results by author "Margaret Jull Costa - Translator - translator" in All Categories

The bestselling novel from international literary phenomenon Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist. ‘Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer…’ So says Maria, a young Brazilian girl convinced from an early age that she will never find true love. A chance meeting in Rio takes her...

Machado de Assis’ classic novel, the precursor of Latin American fiction, is finally rendered as a stunningly relevant work for 21st-century audiences. In eloquent, contemporary prose, Costa and Patterson breathe new life into the dynamic character of Brás Cubas and reveal the vivid, tempestuous Rio de Janeiro of his time. The recently deceased Cubas narrates his life story, admitting glibly: “I am not so much a writer who has died, as a dead man who has decided to write.”

Two decades after Portuguese novelist and Nobel Laureate José Saramago shocked the religious world with his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, he has done it again with Cain, a satire of the Old Testament. Written in the last years of Saramago's life, it tackles many of the moral and...

This breathtaking saga, set in the 1990s, tells the story of the landlords and tenants of a derelict canning factory in Southern Portugal. The wealthy, always-scheming Leandros have owned the building since before the Carnation Revolution, a peaceful coup that toppled a four-decade-long dictatorship and led to Portugal's withdrawal from its African colonies. It was Leandro matriarch Dona Regina who handed the keys to the Matas, the bustling family from Cape Verde who saw past the dusty machinery and converted the space into a warm - and welcoming - home. 

Widely acclaimed as a progenitor of 20th-century Latin American fiction, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil's greatest writer. His prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories rivaled contemporaries like Chekhov, Flaubert, and Maupassant, but, shockingly, he was barely translated into English until 1963, and still lacks proper recognition today. 

Hailed in his lifetime as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was a storyteller known for his wholly innovative narrative techniques and uncanny talent for unraveling the social and political milieu of nineteenth-century Brazil. These signature traits are on full display in Quincas Borba, a novel that sees Machado satirize a rapidly changing Rio de Janeiro. Originally published in 1891, the story begins with the death of its titular character, a mad philosopher infamous for spouting pessimistic theories of “Humanitism”.

From a maverick of 20th century fiction, a domestic drama set on the cusp of Brazil’s abolition of slavery. Released just two months before his death in 1908, Memorial de Ayres was Machado de Assis’s final novel. Written in the form of a diary, it follows the day-to-day happenings of a...

The greatest treasure in the spiritual life is not faith, but love. Love is humankind’s supreme gift and the core of internationally beloved author, Paulo Coelho’s, message. In The Supreme Gift he adapts the classic wisdom of the 19th century biologist, Henry Drummond St Paul, offering a...