Set in Lisbon at the close of the nineteenth century, The Maias is both a coming-of-age novel and a passionate romance. Our hero Carlos Maia, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Portugal, is rich, handsome, generous and intelligent: he means to do something for his country, something useful, something that will make his beloved grandfather proud. However, Carlos is also a bit of a dilettante. He drifts along, becoming a doctor and pottering about in his laboratory, but spends more and more time riding his splendid horses or visiting the theater, having affairs or reading novels. His best friend and chief partner in crime, Ega, is likewise engaged in a long summertime of witticisms and pleasure. Carlos however is set on a dead reckoning course with fate―with the love of his life and with a terrible, terrible secret... Newly translated by the acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa (translator of José Saramago's Blindness), New Directions is proud to bring Eça de Queirós' brilliant prose to life for American readers for the first time.

The Maias

Literature & Fiction

de Eça de Queirós, José Maria

Literary

New Directions

Eça de Queirós's novel is a hymn to country life: The City and The Mountains satirizes the emptiness of city life and of modernity itself. Wonderfully funny, it bubbles with joie de vivre.
Born in Paris, Jacinto is the heir to a vast estate in Portugal which he has never visited. He mixes with the creme de la creme of Paris society, but is monumentally bored. And then he receives a letter from his estate manager saying that they plan to move the bones of his ancestors to the newly renovated chapel―would he like to be there? With great trepidation, Jacinto sets off with his best friend, the narrator, on the mammoth train journey through France and Spain to Portugal. What they discover in the simple country life will upend their own lives deliciously....
Newly translated by the acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions is proud to publish The City and The Mountains, and to once again bring Eça de Queirós' brilliant prose to life.

The City and the Mountains (New Directions Books)

United States

A compassionate tale of marriage, manners, and betrayal, from the Portuguese master José Maria Eça de Queirós, the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with (in his own words) “no digressions, no rhetoric,” creating a book where “everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated.” The story, a terse and seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, concerns a successful businessman who returns home to find his wife “on the yellow damask sofa, leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man.” The man is none other than his best friend and business partner. While struggling with the need to defend his honor, he fights a stronger inner desire for domestic tranquility and forgiveness. The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Eça de Queirós in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy.

The Yellow Sofa (New Directions)

In a brilliant new translation, the wonderful penultimate novel by Eça de Queirós: “Portugal's greatest novelist” (José Saramago)The Illustrious House of Ramires, presented here in a sparkling new translation by Margaret Jull Costa, is the favorite novel of many Eça de Queirós aficionados. This late masterpiece, wickedly funny and yet profoundly tender, centers on Gonçalo Ramires, heir to a family so aristocratic that it predates even the kings of Portugal. Gonçalo―charming but disastrously effete, idealistic but hopelessly weak―muddles through his pampered life, burdened by a grand ambition. He is determined to write a great historical novel based on the heroic deeds of his fierce medieval ancestors. But “the record of their valor,” as The London Spectator remarked, “is ironically counterpointed by his own chicanery. A combination of Don Quixote and Walter Mitty, Ramires is continually humiliated but at the same time kindhearted. Ironic comedy is the keynote of the novel. Eça de Queirós has justly been compared with Flaubert and Stendhal."

The Illustrious House of Ramires (Revived Modern Classic)

Humor & Satire

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by de Eça de Queirós, José Maria. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by de Eça de Queirós, José Maria

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by de Eça de Queirós, José Maria. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Maias

The City and the Mountains (New Directions Books)

The Yellow Sofa (New Directions)

The Illustrious House of Ramires (Revived Modern Classic)