All the Names

José Saramago · 1922–2010 · Portugal

Originally Todos os Nomes (Portuguese) · translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Why it matters

A lonely clerk at a vast Central Registry of the living and the dead secretly pursues the file of a woman he has never met. Saramago's most intimate late novel turns bureaucracy itself into a meditation on mortality and obsession.

At a glance

Quieter and shorter than his major novels, but still built from the same unbroken, unpunctuated sentences.