Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach
Antonio Lobo Antunes author Elizabeth Lowe translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press
Publishing:26th Jun '25
£13.99
This title is due to be published on 26th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A polyphonic novel set over the course of three days, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach is a stunning meditation on memory and time from Antonio Lobo Antunes, considered by many to be Portugal’s greatest living writer.
The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios.
Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator’s corrosive psyche toward our real destination—the place inside herself where the family’s grief-stricken secrets are kept.
“One of the living writers who will matter most” ―Harold Bloom
“Lobo Antunes, one of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere, renders the turpitude of an entire society through an impasto of intensely individual voices.” ―The New Yorker
“He’s been compared to Faulkner, Dos Passos, García Márquez, Céline, Cormac McCarthy, Malcolm Lowry, Proust, Woolf, Canetti, Gogol, Camus, Cortazar, and Nabokov. The real challenge for reviewers is coming up with a new Master of World Literature Antunes hasn’t been compared to.” ―Quarterly Conversation
"Antunes is definitely a writer worth reading for his literary talent and his insights into Portugal's history, geography, and national character." ―Publishers Weekly
"Lobo Antunes’s interweaving of thought, memory and dialogue, both inner and outer, creates as close an experience to the chaos of thinking as is possible on the page. His characters leak trauma while remaining outwardly composed and bland. The inner self is Lobo Antunes’s ultimate preoccupation, especially the exploration of neuroses and phobias." —Times Literary Supplement
“Among our country’s greatest authors. Brazil is summed up in his pages.” —Moacyr Scliar
ISBN: 9781628976120
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
450 pages