Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0802116582, Hardcover)

The Natural Order of Things is a tale of two families and the secrets that bind them; the history of Portugal as family history. The voices and memories of his characters - an army officer being tortured in prison on charges of conspiracy; an elderly man, once a miner in Mozambique, now reduced to dreams of "flying underground"; a diabetic teenage girl and the middle-aged husband she despises; the officer's illegitimate sister, locked away to haunt the house, like Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre - create a portrait of a disintegrating society that attains the brilliant surreality of Elias Canetti and Nikolai Gogol.