All the Names

Set in an unnamed city, Jose Saramago's novel centres on a Central Registry that holds record cards for the births, marriages and deaths of everyone in the city, reaching far into the past. Senhor José, a clerk of about fifty who has held a lowly post there for over twenty years, is the only character given a proper name. He lives alone in a house joined to the registry by its only side entrance, and he has taken to collecting details about famous people, slipping in at night to take their record cards. One night he mistakenly takes an unknown woman's card and grows obsessed with finding her. Margaret Jull Costa's English translation won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Sailo co-founder Magda Marcu said she has a soft spot for Saramago and singled out this novel, along with one other of his books.