Lisbon! Just the name brings thoughts of winding streets, tile-covered buildings, and the sound of Fado. It’s a city with layers of history and atmosphere, so it’s no surprise that many authors have set their stories there.
If you love getting lost in a book that transports you to a specific place, then these novels set in Lisbon are wonderful choices. Each one uses the city not just as a location, but almost as a character itself.
Ricardo Reis, a doctor and poet, comes back to Lisbon in 1936 after years away in Brazil. You can feel the tension in the city; political trouble is brewing under the surface of everyday life.
Reis tries to find his way personally while he considers big questions about life and death. A fascinating part of the story is his encounters with the ghost of the famous poet Fernando Pessoa.
Their talks wander through philosophy and loss as Reis moves through a Lisbon caught between its past and an uncertain future under Salazar’s regime.
This novel takes you to 19th-century Lisbon. Luísa is a housewife, quite bored while her husband travels for work. Her charming cousin Bazilio arrives, and soon she begins an affair. The story shows what happens next.
Luísa gets caught in a web of secrets and fear, particularly when her sharp-eyed maid, Juliana, finds out about the affair and uses the knowledge to gain power over her. The book paints a picture of the city’s society at the time, with all its hidden rules and judgments.
It’s Lisbon in the 1930s, a difficult time politically. Pereira is an older journalist who oversees the culture pages for a minor newspaper, the Lisboeta. He prefers literature and avoids controversy.
His quiet life changes when he meets a young, anti-fascist writer named Monteiro Rossi and his girlfriend Marta. They gradually draw Pereira toward the dangerous world of resistance. You follow Pereira’s thoughts and small actions.
He starts to deeply question his own silence as the world outside his office becomes darker. It’s the story of how one person’s conscience awakens.
This book feels quite different. It follows a narrator through a single, strange summer Sunday in Lisbon. He has arranged to meet the ghost of the poet Fernando Pessoa at noon.
During the day, the narrator meets various people, visits memorable spots, and thinks a lot about memory and people he has lost. Reality and imagination seem to merge. The story gives you a dreamlike, hazy feeling of the city and its unique, slightly sad beauty.
Here is a crime novel with a fascinating structure. It switches between two different time periods. In the present day, Inspector Zé Coelho investigates the disturbing murder of a young girl discovered near the Lisbon coast. Then, the story jumps back to World War II.
We follow Klaus Felsen, a German SS officer who gets involved in Portugal’s murky trade in wolfram, a metal crucial for the war effort. You slowly see how these two stories, separated by decades, connect in a dark and unexpected way.
The story happens in Lisbon right at the start of World War II, in 1940. Portugal is neutral, so Lisbon becomes a temporary refuge, a waiting room for people desperate to escape the chaos in Europe.
Two American couples, Pete and Julia Winters, and Charlie and Iris Freleng, find themselves staying at the same hotel. They are all anxious about their futures and passage to America. Their lives become tangled, and secrets surface while they wait.
The atmosphere of the city at that time – full of refugees, uncertainty, and whispered arrangements – is a constant presence.