This is the seventh volume in the Carcanet's Eça de Queiros programme which includes The Maias, Cousin Basilio, The Illustrious House of Ramires, The City and the Mountains, The Sin of Father Amaro, The Yellow Sofa & Three Portraits.

Artur Corvelo inherits a legacy, quits his provincial home town and sets out for the capital. Armed hopefully with some poems and a heroic play, he seeks literary renown and entry into fashionable intellectual and social circles. Disillusion follows and he returns to his origins, his play unperformed, poorer certainly, wiser perhaps. As so often with Eça de Queiros, the plot is simple; the fascination of the novel lies in the characters, the incidents and, above all, the warm humanity and mordant wit of this acute observer of the human condition. To the Capital, posthumously published in Lisbon has not been previously available in English. It is here translated by John Vetch, whose version of The Yellow Sofa attracted much favourable attention when it was published in 1993. The text used takes account of the scholarly 'definitive' edition of Eça's work recently published in Lisbon.