Called "hallucinatory and lyrical" (Publishers Weekly), The Return of the Caravels — selected as a New York times Summer Reading title — is a powerful indictment of Portuguese colonialism and another literary tour de force from the pen of Antonio Lobo Antunes, "the greatest living Portuguese writer" (Vogue). It is set in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies gain their independence in the mid-1970s. In a contemporary response to Camoes's conquest epic The Lusiads, Antunes imagines Vasco da Gama and other heroes of Portuguese explorations beached amid the detritus of the empire's collapse. Or is it the modern colonials — with their mixed-race heritage and uneasy place in the "fatherland" — who have somehow ended up in sixteenth-century Lisbon? As da Gama begins winning back ownership of Lisbon piece by piece in crooked card games, four hundred years of Portuguese history mingle — the caravels dock next to Iraqi oil tankers, and the slave trade rubs shoulders with the duty-free shops. The Return of the Caravels is a startling and uncompromising look at one of Europe's great colonial powers, and how the era of conquest reshaped not just Portugal but the world. ..". the voice of Nabokov by way of Cortazar, Gogol by way of Dylan." — Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Antunes has empathy for the contradictions of human feeling. He is a warm-bloodied writer."-- Michael Pye, The New York Times Book Review "[Antunes] deserves a wide audience of discerning readers." — Michael Mewshaw, The Washington Post Book World

"A master navigator of the human psyche...[with] the voice of Nabokov by way of Cortazar, Gogol by way of Dylan." Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Antunes has empathy for the contradictions of human feeling. He is a warm-bloodied writer....The Return of the Caravels?...scale makes it a perfect introduction to the dirty, glittering world that [Antunes] makes so painfully real." Michael Pye, The New York Times Book Review

"[Antunes] deserves a wide audience of discerning readers." Michael Mewshaw, The Washington Post Book World

"A twenty-first-century modernist heir to the narrative collage technique championed by such masters as Ferdinand Céline, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, and Italo Calvino....[The Return of the Caravels] is the writing of a genius." Alan Kaufman, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"One of [Antunes?s] most ambitious and most distinctly Portuguese [books]....One can, and should, read The Return of the Caravels for its depiction of a crumbling empire — where the heroic actions of the colonists have been replaced by the monopolistic tendencies of the businessman — its sarcastic bursts of humor and its depressing yet touching scenes that combine in such deft fashion as to reaffirm Antunes?s reputation as one of the great contemporary writers." Chad W. Post, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Great, timeless literature." Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)