Grace period

Portuguese novelist de Carvalho (Empty Wardrobes) sketches a spare and subtly complex portrait of a man reckoning with his past. The narrator, Mateus Silva, begrudgingly returns to his childhood home to sell it to his old neighbor Osório. His terminally ill girlfriend, Alberta, has a dying wish to visit the Acropolis, and he vows to use the money to fund her trip, despite being unsure whether he really loves her. After the sale, Osório invites Mateus to dinner with his wife, Graça, whose beauty captivated Mateus as a child. Years ago, Mateus's father had an affair with Graça, which broke up his parents' marriage. The weight of that history hangs heavy on Mateus, especially because they're joined at dinner by Graça and Osório's daughter, Natália, who was born after the affair and is unsure who her father is. De Carvalho complicates the seemingly straightforward tale of homecoming and family secrets with elliptical dialogue, mirroring the characters' uncertainty about their own motivations and others' ("I don't quite understand," Alberta says, after Silva tries to explain Natália's own affair with a married man, to which he responds, "Neither does she. Neither do I"). Readers will find plenty to admire. Agent: Ella Sher, Ella Sher Literary. (Sept.)

A man returns to his childhood home to bring the life he left behind there to its conclusion, in this translation of a 1973 novel from a celebrated Portuguese novelist. When Mateus Silva was last in the seaside town where he grew up it was 25 years earlier and he was still a boy called Matinho. Though his father and mother both died 10 years earlier, leaving him the sole proprietor of his crumbling childhood home, Mateus has never tried to sell or rent the property out of a sense that "this detail saved everything else from being a total disaster… [having] a little patch of land that was all his in this big, wide world." Now, however, he has a pressing reason to sell. Mateus' longtime girlfriend, Alberta, is dying, and Mateus will use the proceeds from the sale of the house to send her to the Acropolis, a place she has dreamed of visiting since childhood. With this pressing deadline looming, Mateus is content to sell to the first bidder--his former neighbor, Senhor Osório--though doing so brings back the tumultuous childhood memories that sent Mateus and his mother running to Lisbon in the first place. Osório's wife, Graça, occupies an outsize place in Mateus' memory. Neither "skinny and anxious like his mother, nor internally serene and protective like Alberta," Graça's "vital" beauty proved irresistible both to the boyish Matinho that Mateus once was, and to his father, whose public affair with Graça is what originally fractured the family. By selling the house, Mateus has the opportunity to leave the past behind, but the re-emergence of the much denuded Graça in his life, along with his introduction to her chaotic, sensualist daughter, Natália, and Alberta's steady, phlegmatic decline forces Mateus to confront the fact that the past may be the only time in his life that still feels worth living. Through prose that is both melancholy and brutally keen, this midcentury master's eye for the scintillating detail at the heart of even the most mundane observation loses nothing in its translation from its original language, culture, or time. A fierce examination of the unexamined life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.