Now and at the Hour of Our Death
by Susana Moreira Marques
And Other Stories 2015
128 pages
14×21 cm
In her poignant and genre-busting debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us with our own mortality and inspires us to think about what is important.
A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife.
Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to Trás-os- Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abandoned by the young. Crossing great distances where eagles circle over the roads, she listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own meditations.
By dividing the book in three different sections, the author builds an evocative portrait of the ways in which us humans face death — or avoid to do so — managing to universalize the unique and personal stories she is telling us.
Brilliantly blending the immediacy of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage, Moreira Marques’ book speaks about death in a fresh way.
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Press:
«An affecting reflection on death. Marques’s interviews achieve a stark authenticity».
Times Literary Supplement
«A beautiful mediation on life and death. Moreira Marques’ writing shows that there is poetry in the most unexpected places».
New Internationalist
«A brilliant book which pushes the boundaries, not only of literary reportage but of literary genres in general, to discuss that most intimate of moments: death . . . Death isn’t good or bad, death is; and Susana Moreira Marques writes about it in her first book in a way that can only be done by great writers».
Isabel Lucas – Público
«Raymond Carver once wrote about loving everything that increases me. This book increased me. It is fearless and luminous and full of grace; it travels to the edge of death and finds life there. Its attention to the particulars of love—between the ones who will go and the ones they will leave—is something close to sublime».
Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison also chose Now and at the Hour of Our Death as her New York Times Book of the Year
Rights available in a selection of countries
Represented in collaboration with And Other Stories
Susana Moreira Marques (Porto, 1976) is a writer and journalist. She lives in Lisbon, where she writes for Público and Jornal de Negócios. Between 2005 and 2010 Moreira Marques lived in London, working at the BBC World Service while also a correspondent for Portuguese newspaper Público. Her journalism has won several prizes, including the Prémio AMI – Jornalismo Contra a Indiferença and the 2012 UNESCO ‘Human Rights and Integration’ Journalism Award (Portugal). Now and at the Hour of Our Death is her first book.
