Saramago brings Fernando Pessoa's heteronym back to Lisbon in 1936, the year of Pessoa's death and the year fascism consolidates its grip on Portugal. Ricardo Reis, the imaginary poet, wanders a city of ghosts, visited by the shade of his creator. The prose flows in Saramago's characteristic unmarked style, blending interior and exterior, past and present. The novel is at once a ghost story, a political meditation, and a love letter to Lisbon and to Pessoa. It asks what it means to live as fiction in a world that has forgotten how to imagine.