Water Notebooks
$12.95
by João Reis
July 20, 2027
novel | pb | 204 pgs.
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-960385-70-3
One of Portugal’s first “cli-fi” novels, Water Notebooks takes place in the near future, when the Southern Water Wars, and the the First and Second Event, have forced refugees from the south of Europe to seek assistance in the Nordic countries. Housed in a nondescript “welcome center,” these refugees are kept in the dark about not just their situation, but what’s going on in the world at large, and in the case of the novel’s primary narrator, Sara, where her husband might be.
As she takes care of her daughter and navigates the various cliques and plays for powers that develop among the refugees, Sara fills page after page of her notebooks, writing to her husband, unaware of where he is or what he’s going through.
This dystopic and propulsive novel reaffirms João Reis’s place as one of Portugal’s most inventive writers, working in the tradition of José Saramago, Fernando Pessoa, and António Lobo Antunes.
Translated from the Portuguese by Adrian Minckley
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About the Author:
João Reis is a Portuguese writer and literary translator. He writes in both Portuguese and English. Water Notebooks—shortlisted for the Prémio Fernando Namora and Prémio Fundação Eça de Queiroz—is his fifth book to appear in English, alongside The Translator's Bride and The Devastation of Silence (both available from Open Letter Books), Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow, and An Atavic Fear of Hailstorms. He also also translated more the 120 books from Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and English into Portuguese, and has translated more than 120 books so far.
About the Translator:
Adrian Minckley is a translator from Portuguese. Her work has been published by Open Letter Books, Sublunary Editions, Two Lines Press, and Words Without Borders, among others. She lives and works in New Mexico.
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Praise for João Reis:
"The Translator's Bride is a neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty."—Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books
"João Reis . . . is a great connoisseur of literary comedy, in a subtle way in which everything is so natural, but simultaneously rude, with the cruel ways in which various characters are depicted, thus creating a blackly comic web that weaves together the world of the book."—Nelson Zagalo, Virtual Illusion
"João Reis’ great success in The Translator’s Bride is to convince his audience that they are reading a work written at modernism’s mid-twentieth-century zenith . . . pulling us out of our own times and holding us in the era of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway."—West Camel, European Literature Network
