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A Novel
by Margaret Jull Costa
From the winner of the prestigious FIL Prize in Romance Languages comes this masterpiece saga, set in the twilight of the late twentieth century, of two clashing families in coastal Portugal.
With the grand sweep of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, this enduring tale transports us to a picturesque seaside town haunted by its colonial past.
Considered one of Europe's most influential contemporary writers, Portuguese novelist Lídia Jorge has captivated international audiences for decades. With the publication of The Wind Whistling in the Cranes, English-speaking readers can now experience the thrum of her signature poetic style and her delicately braided multicharacter plotlines, and witness the heroic journey of one of the most maddening, and endearing, characters in literary fiction.
Exquisitely translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott, this breathtaking saga, set in the now-distant 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.
When Dona Regina is found dead outside the factory on a holiday weekend, her body covered in black ants, her granddaughter, Milene, investigates. Aware that her aunts and uncles, who are off on vacation, will berate her inability to articulate what has just happened, she approaches the factory riddled with anxiety. Hours later, the Matas return home to find this strange girl hiding behind their clotheslines, and with caution, they take her in...
"Some said that Milene had been found wandering near the golf course...Still others that she must have spent those five days at the beach, eating raw fish and sleeping out in the open..."
Days later, the Leandros realize that Milene has become hopelessly entangled with their tenants, and their fear of political and financial ruin sets off a series of events that threatens to uproot the lives of everyone involved. Narrated with passionate, incandescent prose, The Wind Whistling in the Cranes establishes Lídia Jorge as a novelist of extraordinary international resonance.
"Jorge delivers a captivating Romeo and Juliet–style love story set in the Algarve of Portugal and wrapped in the saga of a country politically altered by postcolonial migration following the Carnation Revolution of 1974...Jorge blends the personal drama with insight on the compounding social issues, making the account sing on several levels. The result is brilliant and trenchant." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Jorge manages to recapitulate many of the issues present in post-colonial Portugal...but she never lets the didactic get in the way of the romantic...[her] narrative ranges from the lyrical to the mundane but conveys the universality of a specific, familial place. Jorge delivers a dose of near-contemporary history tempered by a page-turning family saga and romance." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Award-winning Jorge's richly layered family epic, in its first English translation, examines racial, social, and economic history in Portugal." - Booklist
"Labyrinthine, poetic, musical, bewitching." - Lire Magazine (France)
This information about The Wind Whistling in the Cranes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lídia Jorge is a leading figure in Portuguese literature whose accolades include European Writer of the Year.
Margaret Jull Costa has translated José Saramago and Machado de Assis and lives in England.
Annie McDermott has translated Selva Almada and Mario Levrero and lives in England
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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