The High Mountains of Portugal

A novel in three linked parts, set across the twentieth century and beyond. In the first, a grieving young man in Lisbon sets out in an early motor car to find a mysterious artefact in northern Portugal. In the second, a pathologist and his wife discuss Agatha Christie and the nature of belief. In the third, a Canadian senator moves to rural Portugal with an unusual companion. Each story deals with loss and how people live with it. The book blends humour, strangeness and tenderness, and it returns to Martel's favourite questions about faith, grief and animals.