Annos de Prosa; A Gratido; O Arrependimento

In a feverish meditation on the fate of the novelist, the narrator paints early‑nineteenth‑century Portugal as a land where hunger for stories is matched only by a corrosive flood of cheap melodrama. He laments the way priests of letters trade poison for glittering crystal, while true romance is forced to crawl beneath layers of gallicisms and stale moralism. The prose swirls between scholarly outrage and vivid description of a society that feeds its souls with adulterated fiction.

Within this framework the book unfolds three tightly bound narratives that echo the title’s concerns. A fifteen‑year‑old girl, newly aware of the promises taught by tutors, must confront the gap between idealized innocence and lived experience. Another voice wrestles with gratitude owed to a lover who has vanished, while a third confronts a lingering sense of remorse that threatens to eclipse all future joy. Together they explore love, duty, and the fragile dance between personal desire and the expectations of a rigid world.