Tender reflections on a challenging childhood

Small Memories: A Memoir

By José Saramago

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Harvill Secker, €15.60

Autobiography, like truth, can often be stranger than fiction.

Take, for example, Small Memories, a memoir from Portuguese novelist Jose¤ Saramago, who was born in his grandparents’ mud-floored, two-room house in the rural village of Azinhaga in 1922, before moving at 18 months with his parents to Lisbon.

There, his traffic cop father and illiterate ...