Maias : Episodes from Romantic Life

'Ea de Queiroz spent eight years writing The Maias. This is a novel in the tradition of Flaubert or Dickens, in which de Queiroz anatomises a society through a brilliant drama of a family's decline and downfall. Margaret Jull Costa's translation is supple, transparent and wonderfully paced. There seems to be no barrier at all between the reader and what the author intended. The novel shades from realism to romanticism, from satire to tragedy. The vigour and charm of the characters come across beautifully in this translation, and so does de Queiroz's biting, sometimes despairing view of Lisbon society in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.' Helen Dunmore, novelist and chair of the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.