The Book of Disquiet : The Complete Edition – 9781781258644

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa’s life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa’s celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced.

It is presented here, for the first time in English, by order of original composition, and accompanied by facsimiles of the original manuscript. Narrated principally by an assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares – an alias of sorts for Pessoa himself – The Book of Disquiet is ‘the autobiobraphy of someone who never existed’, a mosaic of dreams, of hope and despair; a hymn to the streets and cafés of 1930s Lisbon, and an extraordinary record of the inner life of one of the century’s most important writers. This new edition represents the most complete vision of Pessoa’s genius.