Seeing by Jose Saramago, translated from Portuguese to English by Margaret Jull Costa, is newly available in stores.

Seeing is the companion novel to Saramago’s earlier Blindness.

About the novel Seeing by Jose Saramago
On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that no one has bothered to come out to vote. The politicians are growing jittery. What’s going on? Should they reschedule the elections for another day? Around three o’clock, the rain finally stops. Promptly at four, voters rush to the polling stations, as if they had been ordered to appear.

But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. The president proposes that a wall be built around the city to contain the revolution. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that had hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? Is she the organizer of a conspiracy against the state? A police superintendent is put on the case.

What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister. A singular novel from the author of Blindness.

For bookclubs
A reading guide is available on the Harcourt website. It features 15 questions for discussion. See the Reading Guide.

An excerpt is also available. Visit Harcourtbooks.com

View more books by Jose Saramago or Search Inside the Book: Amazon.ca