Empty Wardrobes

“Empty Wardrobes will give you a sense of domestic life under the dictatorship: In precise, unsentimental prose, it tells the story of three generations of women overshadowed by the death of a patriarch.” —Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, New York Times

“Executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy…There is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho’s vision and the originality and severity of her voice, as scathing and pitiless in her depiction of ‘empty’ women as in her depiction of oafish swaggering machismo.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“A book about how men betray women, and how women betray each other…a work that does not hesitate to expose the cruelties and power grabs that lie beneath marriage, and how quickly society discards aging women.” —Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review

“The specter of the patriarchy looms over this mid-20th century tale like depression itself. With the astringent wit of Natalia Ginzburg, Empty Wardrobes is a spellbinding book of domestic disorder that sparks with bitterness and humor.” —Lauren LeBlanc, Observer

“Margaret Jull Costa’s translation hits not a single false note. The text has an antique finish without being dated…The novella manages to cast the eye of a worried oracle on an entire nation.” —Asymptote 

“Translated from Portuguese by the award-winning and prolific translator Margaret Jull Costa, the novel is rendered in clear, finely-wrought prose. Not a single word feels wasted or misplaced. …one of those rare, transcendent works.” —The Rupture

“Superb.” —The Modern Novel

“The first by this towering Portuguese novelist to be translated into English…A still, luminous book whose precise characters evoke broad truths about the human experience.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Gracefully translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Dora’s story is illuminating, inspiring, and heartbreaking in equal measures. Fans of Anne Tyler, Marian Keyes, and Christine Féret-Fleury will find themselves absorbed in the novella’s sparse but evocative prose.” —Booklist

“Sharp…This unearthed story leaves readers with much to chew on.” —Publishers Weekly

“Its timeliness is both enlightening and depressing…this novel shows us women who see their restraints but struggle to reach beyond the men and political institutions that uphold them.” —Monica Cardenas, Litro Magazine

“A remarkable, necessary novel about women disposed of by men, about isolation and suspension and damage, with an acute perceptiveness that will pierce your mind. Dora, Manuela, Ana, Júlia, Lisa. These women will remain long after the middling men who have abandoned them fade away, as will Empty Wardrobes, finally, thankfully, translated into English.” —Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy     

“A compact, merciless tragedy… This is a hilarious and devastating novel of a traditional Catholic widow’s consciousness, encased like ambered resin in the ambient cruelty of patriarchy, an oppression even more severe in the God, Fatherland, and Family authoritarianism of the Salazar regime in Portugal. A work like this, set in the regime of a dictator who weaponised Catholicism and ‘family values,’ is by its very nature deeply political.” —from the introduction by Kate Zambreno

“Maria Judite de Carvalho will always be at the forefront of Portuguese literature, whether now or in two or three generations’ time.” —A Capital

“Maria Judite de Carvalho’s fiction…provides us with a vivid portrait of our times, especially in the strange, slippery area of everyday life…” —Expresso