In the summer of 1940, two couples hoping to escape Europe meet at the Café Suiça in Rossio Square, central Lisbon. They have practical problems to deal with, while they wait for the boat that will take them to the USA. “The Two Hotel Francforts” tells the story of a tense week spent in Lisbon, including a doomed love affair.

“The Return” is a novel about the half a million settlers who fled from Angola to Portugal in 1975, following the Angolan War of Independence and the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship. The protagonist of the novel, Rui, is a teenager who has never been to Portugal before and attempts to build a new live in Lisbon with his mother and sister.

“The Piano Cemetery” tells the story of a Portuguese carpenters’ family in the Benfica neighbourhood of Lisbon during the early 20th century. At the back of the carpenter’s shop is a room filled with broken pianos, whose parts are used to repair instruments across Lisbon. “The Piano Cemetery” is a family saga, told through a series of short episodes, exploring the love affairs, marriages, ambitions, and frustrations of the Lázaro family. The novel is partially told by Francisco Lázaro, who runs the marathon of Stockholm.

A Swiss classics teacher comes to the realisation that he is not living his life to its fullest potential and decides to leave his job. He travels to Lisbon to retrace the steps of a Portuguese doctor and philosopher who lived during the Salazar dictatorship. The novel recounts key moments in the doctor’s life, including his rescue of a notorious secret police executioner, his involvement in the resistance, and his relationship with the beautiful Estefânia. Above all, the protagonist seeks to come to terms with his own life and explore the paths of life he never took.

When Regina, the matriarch of the wealthy Leandro family, is found dead in the family’s former cannery factory, her granddaughter Milene begins an investigation. She befriends the Mata family, immigrants from Cape Verde, who now live in the old cannery. As events unfold, Milene and Antonino, one of the Mata sons, fall in love. Their interracial romance is met with disapproval from both families, and the Leandros consider selling the property and evicting the Matas.

A Roma man discovers a headless body in a public park in Porto. Afraid of talking to the police, he tells what he saw the night of the murder to the novel’s protagonist, a journalist working for a tabloid newspaper. Through the interactions between this journalist and an eccentric lawyer, the reader gains insight into the mysterious murder case, but also into Portuguese literature and the political and legal climate of Portugal in the 1990s.

The novel “Mariana” retells the true 17th-century love story of Mariana Alcoforado, a nun in the Convent of Beja, and Noël Bouton, a French officer. When Mariana is abandoned by her French lover, she writes him five passionate love letters that gained widespread fame across Europe, immortalising her as a romantic icon.

“Pereira Maintains” is set in Lisbon in 1938, during the authoritarian Salazar regime. Pereira is a middle-aged journalist who writes for the cultural pages of a small Lisbon newspaper. He struggles with his health, loneliness, and the heat in Lisbon. When a young man named Monteiro Rossi becomes his assistant and sends him left-wing articles, Pereira is too fearful to publish them. Yet after a terrible act of violence by the Portuguese police, Pereira takes a courageous stand in an act of rebellion.

When Portugal’s African colonies gain independence in the 1970s, Vasco da Gama and other Portuguese explorers return to Lisbon in search of shelter and livelihood, only to find a country they no longer recognise. “The Return of the Caravels” is a surreal novel that switches between centuries of Portuguese history, portraying the once-glorious heroes of discovery and colonialism as degraded 20th-century refugees who end up on the fringes of modern society.

“Winter in Lisbon” is a blend of a love story and crime novel, set in the shadowy bars and hotels of Lisbon, Madrid, and San Sebastian. It follows the romance between Santiago, a jazz pianist, and Lucrecia, a mysterious woman married to an American art dealer. When a painting by Paul Cézanne goes missing, the lovers find themselves pursued by Lucrecia’s husband and a gang of art-smugglers.