Winter in Lisbon by Antonio Munoz Molina📖

Summary of Winter in Lisbon

“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.

Reasons to read Winter in Lisbon 

“Winter in Lisbon” is a literary thriller, where jazz music and art take centre stage. Often described as a tribute to the American ‘film noir’ of the 1950s, the novel was adapted into a Spanish film in 1991, featuring Dizzy Gillespie as a jazz trumpeter. The author, Antonio Muñoz Molina, one of Spain’s leading contemporary writers, won the Principe de Asturias Award in 2013. “Winter in Lisbon”, one of his early works, earned both the Premio Nacional de Narrativa and the Premio de la Crítica in 1988. His most acclaimed novel is arguably “El jinete polaco” (“The Spanish Rider”), which won the Premio Planeta in 1991 and the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 1992. More recently, his novel “To Walk Alone in the Crowd” received the 2020 Prix Méditerranée Étranger.

Setting: Lisbon (Portugal) & San Sebastian, Madrid (Spain)

Original title: El invierno en Lisboa

Year of publication: 1987

Nr of pages: 224