Five Days, Five Nights : (Cinco Dias, Cinco Noites)

The Portuguese Communist Party is, proportionate to the size of the country’s population, one of the largest in the world, certainly in the capitalist world. It must have come as something of a surprise for Portuguese readers to learn that its longtime leader, Alvaro Cunhal, writing under the pen name, Manuel Tiago, had made a sideline career for himself as a neo-realist fiction writer.

With this book we are pleased to present a literary talent heretofore unknown in the English-reading world. Tiago's use of language is rich and exuberant, his characterizations are empathic and intuitive. Like a master painter, he supplies enough suggestive detail to fill out a larger picture of Portuguese society.