The wind whistling in the cranes A novel

In Portugal, 1994, at the peak of summer, Milene Leandro searches for the reason her grandmother escaped from an ambulance and walked more than a mile to the gates of their family's former canning factory, where she then died. Milene's aunts and uncles are all away, and she knows they will have questions. She traces her grandmother's steps back to the factory, which the Mata family now rents as their home. Immigrants from Cape Verde, the Matas take Milene in until her family returns. Founded in 1908, the Leandros' factory served as the center of the community, was handed over to workers in the 1970s and returned to the family in the 1980s, and now appeals to a Dutch developer as the location for their next luxury resort. Without their matriarch to make decisions, the Leandros plot their next moves with their inheritance, while Milene and Antonino Mata begin a tentative romance. First published in 2002, award-winning Jorge's richly layered family epic, in its first English translation, examines racial, social, and economic history in Portugal.

Jorge (The Painter of Birds) delivers a captivating Romeo and Juliet--style love story set in the Algarve of Portugal and wrapped in the saga of a country politically altered by postcolonial migration following the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Workers are taking control of factories and farms, selling machinery, and ruining businesses. By 1984, defunct cannery Fabrica de Conservas Leandro is home to the Matas, a family of Cape Verde immigrants who rent from Dona Regina Leandro. After the Leandro matriarch wanders out of an ambulance wearing a nightgown at a gas station and staggers to the gates of the Old Factory, where she dies, her granddaughter, Milene, seeks the truth behind the unexplainable events. Dominoes fall quickly once the Matas find Milene, "the white person," hiding in the courtyard. After Milene meets the widowed Antonino Mata, circumstances become the "absolute monarchs" of Milene's and Antonio's lives as their devious family members try to keep them apart. Meanwhile, developers swarm around the canning factory and the future looks uncertain for the community. Throughout, Jorge blends the personal drama with insight on the compounding social issues, making the account sing on several levels. The result is brilliant and trenchant. (Feb.)

The fates and fortunes of two Portuguese families become entwined during the later years of the 20th century. The lonely death of Dona Regina, the matriarch of the influential Leandro family, prompts her granddaughter Milene to investigate its circumstances so she can explain them to the rest of her extended family, all of whom are out of reach on vacation at the time. Milene, an opaque and guileless sort, revisits the site of her grandmother's demise, the family's former cannery on the Portuguese coast. Her futile investigative efforts bring her into the orbit of the Mata family, the current tenants of the cannery, who have turned it into their family compound. The welcome extended to her by the Matas, working-class immigrants from Cape Verde, contrasts (in almost every measurable way) with the hand-wringing, anger, and annoyance Milene's presence provokes within her own family. Jorge manages to recapitulate many of the issues present in post-colonial Portugal--racism, workers' rights, sexism, economic disparities, overdevelopment--within the context of Milene's developing romance with one of the Matas, but she never lets the didactic get in the way of the romantic. An anonymous and enigmatic narrator propels much of the narrative while essential aspects of Milene's sometimes-puzzling character are slowly revealed. Present in both families are key actors and bit players living a thoroughly 20th-century life in Portugal: the White cannery scions are succeeded on their landholdings by the Black Matas, who have produced a pop star (tuna replaced by tunes?). As translated from the Portuguese by the team of Jull Costa and McDermott, who provide an extensive introduction to the work, Jorge's narrative ranges from the lyrical to the mundane but conveys the universality of a specific, familial place. Jorge delivers a dose of near-contemporary history tempered by a page-turning family saga and romance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.