Summer Books: 42 21st-Century Novels

First, a few certainties: nonfiction is gaining a growing following and is increasingly well-represented in the Portuguese book market. Historical books are as essential as they are captivating; biographies can become a difficult addiction to overcome; collections of chronicles can offer challenging reading; and personal essays are increasingly bold, both in their thematic scope and in their writing style. But there are functions that only fiction can fulfill, and there are places only a novel can take us.

Reading is not a natural activity because, for it to be fully realized, all the senses must reach a kind of existential pause. Vision must be focused on a single point, and from there, the mind takes care of the rest. And this is where the great magic of fiction lies. It's not "just" a matter of vocabulary, sentence construction, or syntactical manipulation. It's the reader's inevitability in entering a kind of trance. A novel takes the reader to the place where the story unfolds, to the people who star in it, to the center of the action. At the same time, it confronts that same reader with themselves, with their memories and doubts, with their fears and desires. This abstraction is fundamental to creativity. And it is creativity that makes us individual.

Now that we've settled this mystical-philosophical question, we can move on to the list of 42 novels we suggest for summer reading, so that the escape that fiction allows has space in days that are expected to be longer, less rushed, and, above all, generous. The rules that Observador's journalists and regular contributors followed were simple: each contribution includes one novel originally published in Portuguese (regardless of the author's nationality) and another in a foreign language. All were published since 2001 and all were published in Portugal. The choices have an obvious result: a portrait of the multiple landscapes that welcome contemporary fiction. Happy reading.