António Lobo Antunes

A polyphonic novel set over the course of three days, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach is a stunning meditation on memory and time from Antonio Lobo Antunes, considered by many to be Portugal’s greatest living writer.

The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios.

Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator’s corrosive psyche toward our real destination—the place inside herself where the family’s grief-stricken secrets are kept.

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