"This is an important book, one that is unafraid to face all of the horrors of the century."
--The Washington Post
"Symphonic . . . [There is] a clear-eyed and compassionate acknowledgment of things as they are, a quality
that can only honestly be termed wisdom. We should be grateful when it is handed to us in such generous measure."
--The New York Times Book Review
Harvest Books Web Site, January, 2003
Summary
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind
to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping
women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a
girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the
surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors
of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites
and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive
against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.
