Night Train to Lisbon

A Bern classics teacher finds a book of Portuguese philosophical prose left on a bridge railing and, on impulse, boards the overnight train south. In Lisbon, he moves through the Alfama and Mouraria neighborhoods, hunting traces of Amadeu de Prado — a physician who wrote in secret under Salazar's Estado Novo and whose circles touched the Carnation Revolution of April 1974. Mercier uses the city's steep tram routes and tile-faced walls as the setting for questions about how much of a life can be reconstructed from what it left behind.