Jose Saramago · 1982 · exile

Saramago's international breakthrough, and the book that has its own signposted route - fifty-eight kilometres through Lisbon, Loures and Mafra. A one-handed soldier and a woman who can see inside people help a real priest build a flying machine, while fifty thousand conscripted men build a king's convent at Mafra.

1. 1
   Rossio

   Lisbon, and an auto-da-fe: Blimunda's mother flogged and exiled to Angola for seeing inside people - and a one-handed soldier home from the Spanish war watches, and the two of them go home together that night.

2. 2
   Terreiro do Paco

   The royal square, where King Joao V promises a convent at Mafra if his Austrian queen gives him an heir - and where Bartolomeu de Gusmao, a real priest and real aviation pioneer, is licensed to build a flying machine.

3. 3
   Santo Antao do Tojal

   The archbishop's palace north of Lisbon, on the road the convent's materials travel - one of the four monuments the official Rota Memorial do Convento is built round, on a trail through three municipalities.

4. 4
   Mafra

   The convent itself, and the part that is not romance at all - fifty thousand men conscripted off the land and worked like animals, and one stone hauled from Pero Pinheiro by six hundred oxen, which takes a whole chapter.

5. 5
   Monte Junto

   The passarola actually flies, on Blimunda's collected human wills, and comes down in the sierra north of Lisbon - where it is hidden, and where Baltasar goes back to it years later and is carried off by it alone.

6. 6
   Cheleiros

   The village church at the far end of the official route, in the Mafra hills - the country the two of them walk between the convent and the machine, over the years the book covers.

7. 7
   Rossio

   Another auto-da-fe, and Blimunda has been looking for him for nine years - and finds him on the pyre, and takes what she came for, which is the last line of one of the great endings in Portuguese.