This early work is deeply personal and José Saramago 's most autobiographical, following the changing fortunes of the Mau-Tempo family poor, landless peasants not unlike the authors own grandparents. Saramago charts the family's lives in Alentjo, southern Portugal, as national and international events rumble on in the background the coming of the republic in Portugal, the First and Second World Wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazar's life. Yet, nothing really impinges on the farm labourers' lives until the first stirrings of communism.

As full of love as it is of pain, it is a vivid, moving tribute to the men and women among whom Saramago lived as a child.

José Saramagois one of the most important international writers of thelast hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication ofBaltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.