A man wanders through Lisbon on a blistering Sunday and meets the dead.

The narrator drifts from café to cemetery to riverside, encountering figures from his past — including my hero (and Tabucchi's hero) Fernando Pessoa — as if time has loosened its grip for the afternoon.

Tabucchi wrote this in Portuguese, not his native Italian, as an act of devotion to Lisbon. The result is spare, lucid, almost weightless prose carrying something heavy underneath. It reads like a dream that knows it’s a dream; you'll read it just as fleetingly but it's one to re-read.

If you like Sebald, Pessoa, or European fiction where memory does the work, this is for you.