Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach

A polyphonic novel set over the course of three days, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach is a stunning meditation on memory and time from Antonio Lobo Antunes, considered by many to be Portugal’s greatest living writer.

The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios.

Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator’s corrosive psyche toward our real destination—the place inside herself where the family’s grief-stricken secrets are kept.

Antonio Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1942. He began writing as a child, but at his father's wishes, went to medical school instead of pursuing a career in writing. After completing his studies, Antunes was sent to Angola with the Portuguese Army. It was in a military hospital in Angola that Antunes first became interested in many of the subjects of his novels. Antunes lives in Lisbon, where he continues to write and practice psychiatry.

Elizabeth Lowe, born in New York City, has translated over thirty works by Lusophone writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Africa. She was one of the first to translate Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca, Nélida Piñon, and António Lobo Antunes. She is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature (1982), and co-author with Earl E. Fitz of Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2008), along with many scholarly articles and book chapters. She is a recipient of an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants for language preservation projects, Fulbright fellowships to Colombia and Brazil, and recognition by the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Her memoir, Translating from the Portuguese: A Life Translated, is forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.