Small Hours in Lisbon

Very little happens in this novel, and that is the point. Two people keep almost saying something for two hundred and eighty pages, and the almost is the whole pleasure.

The Lisbon setting avoids postcard duty; the city is mostly staircases, late trams and closing time. The prose is unshowy and precise.

Readers who need incident will be restless. Readers who understand that a romance is a conversation with a delay built into it will not put it down.