Night Train to Lisbon recounts the travels of Swiss Classics instructor Raimund Gregorius as he explores the life of Amadeu de Prado, a Portuguese doctor, during António de Oliveira Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship in Portugal. Prado is a serious thinker whose active mind becomes evident in a series of his notes collected and read by Gregorius.

A chance encounter with a Portuguese woman on a bridge, followed by picking up a book in a bookstore, lead to questioning everything in the protagonist’s life.

Quit his job, hopped a train and began to explore.  This is the tale of two men, Gregorius, a Classics teacher who has hidden away from life in the realm of scholarship and Amadeu de Prado, a brilliant, passionate man, a doctor who became a member of the resistance to the government of Salazar in 20th century Portugal.

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”

You’ll stop many times during your read, and sit and think about what’s going on around you. 

Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier,  Barbara Harshav (Translator), was also made into a movie starring Jeremy Irons.

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802143976