PinT Book Club 20th session

Welcome to the 20th meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss The Wind Whistling in the Cranes alongside Portuguese author Lídia Jorge and translators Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott, published in 2022 by Liveright Publishing. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese).

Doors will open at 18.50, so we can start promptly at 19.00 from now on. Nearer the time, we'll send you the Zoom link via email.

About the book

With the grand sweep of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, this enduring tale transports us to a picturesque seaside town haunted by its colonial past.

Considered one of Europe’s most influential contemporary writers, Portuguese novelist Lídia Jorge has captivated international audiences for decades. With the publication of The Wind Whistling in the Cranes, English-speaking readers can now experience the thrum of her signature poetic style and her delicately braided multicharacter plotlines, and witness the heroic journey of one of the most maddening, and endearing, characters in literary fiction.

Exquisitely translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott, this breathtaking saga, set in the now-distant 1990s, tells the story of the landlords and tenants of a derelict canning factory in southern Portugal. The wealthy, always-scheming Leandros have owned the building since before the Carnation Revolution, a peaceful coup that toppled a four-decade-long dictatorship and led to Portugal’s withdrawal from its African colonies. It was Leandro matriarch Dona Regina who handed the keys to the Matas, the bustling family from Cape Verde who saw past the dusty machinery and converted the space into a warm—and welcoming—home.

When Dona Regina is found dead outside the factory on a holiday weekend, her body covered in black ants, her granddaughter, Milene, investigates. Aware that her aunts and uncles, who are off on vacation, will berate her inability to articulate what has just happened, she approaches the factory riddled with anxiety. Hours later, the Matas return home to find this strange girl hiding behind their clotheslines, and with caution, they take her in . . .

“Some said that Milene had been found wandering near the golf course. . . . Still others that she must have spent those five days at the beach, eating raw fish and sleeping out in the open . . .”

Days later, the Leandros realize that Milene has become hopelessly entangled with their tenants, and their fear of political and financial ruin sets off a series of events that threatens to uproot the lives of everyone involved. Narrated with passionate, incandescent prose, The Wind Whistling in the Cranes establishes Lídia Jorge as a novelist of extraordinary international resonance.

Lídia Jorge was born in Boliqueime, southern Portugal, in 1946. She studied French Literature in Lisbon and spent some years teaching in Angola and Mozambique, during the independence struggle. She now lives in Lisbon. Her first two novels placed her in the avant-garde of contemporary Portuguese literature and since then she has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. In 2013, Lídia Jorge was honoured as one of the “10 greatest literary voices” by the renowned French Magazine Littéraire, and in 2014, she was awarded the Premio Luso-Español de Arte y Cultura. She has been awarded the Vergílio Ferreira Award 2015 for her body of work.

The International Book Fair (FIL) of Guadalajara has granted the renowned FIL Prize in Romance Languages 2020 to Lídia Jorge “because of the magnitude of her work, which portrays the way in which human beings face the great events of history”. The jury also highlighted Jorge’s literary career, “marked by originality and independence of judgement”. The prize honors the author’s lifetime achievement and consists of 150,000 U$. In 2021, Lídia Jorge took up a professorship at the University of Geneva which was followed by the Lídia Jorge Chair created by the UMass Amherst University in Massachussets in 2022, and the Lídia Jorge Chair at the Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG) in Brazil in 2024. Her novel MERCY has received six prestigious awards, among them the Médicis étranger 2023 and the Transfuge Prize for the Best Lusophone Novel 2023. According to the Portuguese Book Institute DGLAB, Lídia Jorge is the fifth most translated Portuguese author, after Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queiroz, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Luís de Camões. In 2025, Lídia Jorge was appointed Commandeure des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marías, Benito Pérez Galdós, Bernardo Atxaga, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz, and poets: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa and Ana Luísa Amaral.

Annie McDermott is a translator working from Portuguese and Spanish. Her translations include the novel The Wind Whistling in the Cranes by Lidia Jorge (co-translation with Margaret Jull Costa), poetry by Carla Diacov in the anthology Cuíer: Queer Brazil, and short stories by Mário de Andrade, Hélia Correia, Marcelino Freire and Graciliano Ramos. Her work has been shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclán and the TA First Translation Prize, and she also reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement. She has previously lived in Mexico and Brazil, and is now based in Hastings, in the UK.

Praise for THE WIND WHISTLING IN THE CRANES :

"Jorge delivers a dose of near-contemporary history tempered by a page-turning family saga and romance."

— Kirkus Review

"A big, satisfying national saga."

— Wall Street Journal

"The novel moves rhythmically.…This is a thrillingly immersive ‘parable about life, about the struggle between rich and poor, between one race and another.’ Even the trees and surrounding landscape — ‘mute figures who, of course, had knowledge and memory’ — have their point of view."

— New York Times Book Review

"Comparisons have already been drawn to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels—and it’s not hard to see why with the book’s distinctive blend of social history and the most intimate of family sagas. But Jorge’s book is very much its own thing, with a razor-sharp postcolonial subtext that asks deeper questions about who we consider the outsider, and why."

— Vogue

"A spellbinding and poetic melody whose power touches and amplifies you long after you have finished reading it."

— Le Figaro