Jerusalem

One morning late in May, between three and six A.M., a group of lonely men and women wait to be brought together, like the elements in an equation. Ernst Spengler is about to throw himself out his window. Mylia, terminally ill and in enormous pain, goes out to visit a church. Hinnerk Obst, who's always been told by the neighborhood children that he looks like a murderer, walks the streets with a loaded gun.  As these characters are manipulated and brought together, a world of violence, fear, pain, and uncertainty is portrayed, where human nature itself, and the mechanisms determining our actions, our fictions, and the elements of our imagination, are laid bare.  Jerusalem is a terrifying and grimly humorous summation of the possibilities and limits of the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century.

"Goncalo M. Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries. This, combined with a language entirely his own, mingling bold invention and a mastery of the colloquial, means that it would be no exaggeration to say--with no disrespect to the young Portuguese novelists writing today--that there is very much a before Goncalo M. Tavares and an after . . . I've predicted that in thirty years' time, if not before, he will win the Nobel Prize and I'm sure my prediction will come true." Jose Saramago

"Yes, it's bleak--but it's also daring, thought-provoking and brilliant." Daniel Hahn

"This is a powerful little book and Dalkey Archive should be commended for bringing it to an anglophone audience." The Independent [UK]

Hailed by Jose Saramago as the best writer of his generation and a likely future winner of the Nobel Prize, Dalkey Archive is proud to introduce Goncalo M. Tavares and his breakthrough novel.

Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in 1970. He has published numerous books since 2001 and has been awarded an impressive number of literary prizes in a very short time, including the Saramago Prize in 2005.Anna Kushner was born in Philadelphia and first traveled to Cuba in 1999. Beside her “commanding translation” (Words Without Borders) of The Halfway House (ND, 2009), her writing and translations have appeared in numerous other print and web publications.The Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago was a novelist, playwright and journalist. His numerous books, including the bestselling All the Names, Blindness, and The Cave, have been translated into more than forty languages and have established him as one of the world's most influential writers. He died in June 2010.