"A taut, uneasy book, haunted by green-haired women and childhood-glimpsed beauty, and filled with bittersweet melancholy. The sale of a home shouldn't be as tension-filled and catalyzing as it is in this brilliant blade-point of a novel by Maria Judite de Carvalho"--Madeline Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest

"Through prose that is both melancholy and brutally keen, this midcentury master's eye for the scintillating detail at the heart of even the most mundane observation loses nothing in its translation from its original language, culture, or time. A fierce examination of the unexamined life."--Kirkus, starred review

"A spare and subtly complex portrait of a man reckoning with his past."--Publishers Weekly

"The magnificence of Margaret Jull Costa's translations of Maria Judite de Carvalho lies in the quiet naturalness with which the sentences seem to flow despite being astonishing, sometimes radical, at times even disturbing. In Carvalho's Grace Period, everything is quiet: the lushness of the prose, its anger and its barbs, the empty house, the characters' various ways of stifling themselves; and quiet itself, like absence, is capable of different tones and connotations."--Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box

Praise for Maria Judite de Carvalho

"Executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy...There is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho's vision and the originality and severity of her voice, as scathing and pitiless in her depiction of 'empty' women as in her depiction of oafish swaggering machismo." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

"Melancholic, contemplative, and often heartbreaking."--Foreword Reviews

"These stories are bold and unsparing, quietly devastating. A fearless exploration of longing and the claustrophobia of loneliness."--Kayla Maiuri, author of Mother in the Dark

"Empty Wardrobes will give you a sense of domestic life under the dictatorship: In precise, unsentimental prose, it tells the story of three generations of women overshadowed by the death of a patriarch." --Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, The New York Times

"A book about how men betray women, and how women betray each other...a work that does not hesitate to expose the cruelties and power grabs that lie beneath marriage, and how quickly society discards aging women." --Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review

"The specter of the patriarchy looms over this mid-20th century tale like depression itself. With the astringent wit of Natalia Ginzburg, Empty Wardrobes is a spellbinding book of domestic disorder that sparks with bitterness and humor." --Lauren LeBlanc, Observer

"Margaret Jull Costa's translation hits not a single false note. The text has an antique finish without being dated...The novella manages to cast the eye of a worried oracle on an entire nation." --Asymptote

"Translated from Portuguese by the award-winning and prolific translator Margaret Jull Costa, the novel is rendered in clear, finely-wrought prose. Not a single word feels wasted or misplaced. ...one of those rare, transcendent works." --The Rupture

"Superb." --The Modern Novel

Publisher: Two Lines Press

Pub date: 2025-09-16

Length: 168 pages