The Land at the End of the World

In The Land at the End of the World, one of the twentieth century's most original literary voices delivers a haunting and heartrending meditation on the absurdities of love and war. Considered to be Antonio Lobo Antunes's masterpiece, The Land at the End of the World - now in a new and fully restored translation by Margaret Jull Costa - recounts the anguished tale of a Portuguese medic haunted by memories of war, who, like the Ancient Mariner, will tell his tale to anyone who listens. The narrator, recently returned to Lisbon after his hellish tour of duty in Angola, confesses the traumas of his memory to a nameless lover. Their evening unfolds like a fever dream, as Lobo Antunes leaps deftly back and forth from descriptions of post-dictatorship Portugal to the bizarre and brutal world of life on the front line. The result, both tragic and absurd, belongs among the great war novels of the modern age.