Like a Portuguese version of As I Lay Dying, but more ambitious, Antonio Lobo Antunes's eleventh novel chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society - a society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule. In this his masterful novel, Antonio Lobo Antunes, 'one of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere, renders the turpitude of an entire society through an impasto of intensely individual voices.' (The New Yorker) The protagonist and anti-hero Senhor Francisco, a powerful state minister and personal friend of Salazar, expects to be named prime minister when Salazar is incapacitated by a stroke in 1968. Outraged that the President (Admiral Americo Tomas) appoints not him but Marcelo Caetano to the post, Senhor Francisco retreats to his farm in Setubal, where he vaguely plots a coup with other ex-ministers and aged army officers who feel they've been snubbed or forgotten. But it's younger army officers who in 1974