Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily preoccupations. In the evenings, and on weekends, he works on bringing up to date his clipping file of the famous, the rising stars, the notorious. But when one day he comes across the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman, he decides that this cannot have been mere chance, he has to discover more about her. After all, to know a name is not to know the person.

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Under the increasingly mystified eye of the Registrar, a godlike figure whose name is spoken only in whispers, the now obsessed Senhor José sets off, in every moment he can steal from work, to follow the thread that leads him to the woman's school, to her godmother, to her father and mother-but as he gets closer to a meeting with the unknown woman, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would have wished....

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The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative...once again José Saramago has written a timeless story.

若澤•薩拉馬戈（José Saramago，19222010）

葡萄牙作傢。1947年齣版首部小說《罪孽之地》，1995年獲葡萄牙語文學最高奬項卡濛斯文學奬。1998年，因其“充滿想象、同情和諷喻的寓言故事，不斷地使我們對虛幻的現實加深理解”，被授予諾貝爾文學奬。

薩拉馬戈的作品風格獨特，內涵深刻，作品主題大多關心的是人類的命運與世界的前途。寫作手法上，他創立瞭一種充滿想象、隱喻和諷刺的小說類型，贏得瞭無數讀者的贊譽。

他一生創作瞭數十部小說和其他文學作品，已經被翻譯成30多種語言，總銷售超過350萬冊，主要作品包括《修道院紀事》、《洞穴》、《大象旅行記》、《石筏》等。