Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach

"In this elegy for a family, or for the family that could have been, Antunes masterfully evokes the obsessive pull of family life, the peculiar intensity of its joys and miseries. 'We had missed being happy by a thread,' the narrator thinks at one point, 'what did we do wrong.' Readers should not be put off by the narrative disorder and paucity of plot; Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach is fiction of the highest order." ―The Washington Post

“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

“He’s been compared to Faulkner, Dos Passos, Garcíiacute;a Máaacute;rquez, Céeacute;line, Cormac McCarthy, Malcolm Lowry, Proust, Woolf, Canetti, Gogol, Camus, Cortazar, and Nabokov. The real challenge for reviewers is coming up with a new Master of World Literature Antunes hasn’t been compared to.” ―Quarterly Conversation

“Antunes is definitely a writer worth reading for his literary talent and his insights into Portugal's history, geography, and national character.” ―Publishers Weekly

“Lobo Antunes’s interweaving of thought, memory and dialogue, both inner and outer, creates as close an experience to the chaos of thinking as is possible on the page. His characters leak trauma while remaining outwardly composed and bland. The inner self is Lobo Antunes’s ultimate preoccupation, especially the exploration of neuroses and phobias.” -Times Literary Supplement

“One of the living writers who will matter most.” ―Harold Bloom

“Midnight feels like an act of technology as much as it is a narrative; it isn’t even trying to teach you how to use it or what might be harnessed by its powers, but more so providing a model and a mechanism both by which one might gain insight in their own experience of the world before too late.” —Blake Butler, Dividual

“Among our country’s greatest authors. Brazil is summed up in his pages.” —Moacyr Scliar

“Antóoacute;nio Lobo Antunes offers Greater Lisbon’s answer to The Sound and the Fury’s Compson family… Deftly rendered in English by translator Elizabeth Lowe, the novel is a nonlinear, minimally punctuated onslaught of memories, interspersed with refrains of unattributed dialogue that give voice to furniture, plush toys, and blackbirds.” —The Drift