Skylight

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2014: Anyone who has ever lived in an apartment building is familiar with the unique intimacy that such dwellings unintentionally provide. You may never see your upstairs neighbor, but you know that he wakes up at 6am sharp, grinds his coffee beans, and has a parrot that knows how to say a few choice curse words. Sometimes you know far more--stories pieced together by casual encounters in common areas, or bits of conversations overheard through too-thin walls...In the previously unpublished novel, Skylight, the late, great José Saramago gives us unfettered access to the lives of several tenants in a Lisbon apartment building in 1940—lives that intersect and sometimes clash in shocking ways. Saramago’s gift for penning well-drawn female characters is on full display here, as is his mastery of illuminating the extraordinary in the mundane. But Skylight is also a very philosophical novel in Saramago’s signature style, one in which the characters wrestle with profound questions, questions the reader will grapple with long after the last page is turned. –Erin Kodicek