A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her
husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be
hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife. In her
poignant and genre-busting debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us
with our own mortality and inspires us to think about what is important.
Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travels to
Trás-os-Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area
abandoned by the young. Crossing great distances where eagles circle
over the roads, she visits villages where rural ways of life are
disappearing. She listens to families facing death and gives us their
stories in their words as well as through her own meditations.
Brilliantly blending the immediacy of oral history with the sensibility
of philosophical reportage, Moreira Marques's book speaks about death in
a fresh way.