Small Memories

Born in Portugal in 1922 in the tiny village of Azinhaga, Jose Saramago was only eighteen months old when he moved with his father and mother to live in a series of cramped lodgings in a working-class neighbourhood of Lisbon. Nevertheless, he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence, its river landscape and olive groves seeping deep into his memory.

Shifting back and forth between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this touching book is a mosaic of memories, a gathering together of the fragmented recollections that make up the idea of one's youth. Written with Saramago's characteristic wit and honesty, Small Memories traces the formation of an artist fascinated by words and stories from an early age and who emerged, against all the odds, as one of the world's most respected writers.

By the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Review: The voice of Small Memories is so immediate, genial and full of simple affection for the boy he was, that reading it feels very much like sharing a fireside with a talkative uncle * Guardian *

A moving account of his childhood and adolescence...Small Memories will delight -- Raymond Carr * The Spectator *

A real insight into the making of a great writer * Independent *

It's impossible not to be charmed by this fluid, spontaneous-seeming memoir of boyhood from the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramago [...] For all its delightful novelty, however, the childhood described here is also beguilingly universal: the superstitions and terrors, the mysteries and joys * Daily Mail *

A powerful and nostalgic memoir * The Times *