Eca de Queiroz Book order

Cousin Bazilio is a tale of sexual folly and hypocrisy and vividly depicts life in nineteenth-century Lisbon. Eca gives us a whole gallery of characters from Bazilio, the suave villain to Jorge, the smugly uxorious husband, from Luiza, the bored empty-headed wife to Juliana, the plain, ailing maidservant desperate, by whatever means, to grab some of life's little luxuries, from Leopoldina, nicknamed 'the Ever-Open Door', to Joana the cook and her affair with the tubercular carpenter who lives opposite, and the voluminous Dona Felidade who nurses an entirely unrequited passion for the unbearably pompous Acacio, who lives in concubinage with his much younger housekeeper, who is also having an affair...

The Maias is part of Dedalus' project to make all of Eca de Queiroz' major works available in English. Margaret Jull Costa's translation of The Maias won both The Pen and The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes. According to Publishers Weekly, 'This novel stands with the great achievements of fiction.'

Two friends were kidnapped on the road to Sintra by three masked men and taken to a mysterious house. In the house there is a corpse. The usual questions arise: who was he? How did he die? Was it a natural death or a murder? Who was the perpetrator or the instigator of the crime? The two friends are the two narrators - Eca de Queiroz and Ramalho Ortigao - whose story was published in the form of letters to the editor recounting what happened to them."

Eca de Queiroz began his career as a self-declared realist, but as his writing evolved, his novels and stories became a potent blend of realism and fantasy. In this volume, comprising one short novel and six short stories, the reader is introduced to a dazzling variety of worlds and characters - a deceived husband who finds that jealousy is not the answer, a lovelorn Greek poet-turned-waiter working in a Charing Cross hotel, a saintly young woman soured by love, a follower of St Francis who learns that an entire life of virtue can be besmirched by one cruel act, Adam in Paradise pondering the pros and cons of dominion over the earth, Jesus healing a child, and a loyal nursemaid forced to make a terrible choice.