Third Floor, No Elevator - by Susana Moreira Marques (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A personal reflection on everyday acts of urban living, from the perspective of a woman, writer and mother returned to a gentrified Lisbon.

From a flat in Lisbon, Moreira Marques weaves together the elements of a woman's relationship to the city she calls home, branching out into the various spaces she has inhabited--places defined by desire, missed connections, books, late-night parties, growing children, love, and memories once thought lost. At its heart are moments of watching from a balcony window or through a digital screen and looking into herself in moments of rare quietude.

Review Quotes

"Elegant and searching, Third Floor, No Elevator finds spaciousness in the fragments. Observing the world from her third-floor apartment in Lisbon, Moreira Marques moves effortlessly between the intimate and the urban, tracing what it means to inhabit a place, to leave it, and to return." --Saleem Haddad

"Built from observations and intuitions, in a meticulously crafted fragmented mosaic, revealing--behind the apparent banality of everyday life--glimpses that only literature can give meaning to, Susana Moreira Marques's literary work unquestionably deserves that we borrow a beautiful title from Roland Barthes to bestow upon it: this is writing made up of fragments of a discourse of love." --Carlos Vaz Marques

About the Author

Susana Moreira Marques is the author of four books of literary non-fiction, most recently Third Floor, No Elevator: Notes from Lisbon, as well as a children's book and a graphic novel. She lives in Lisbon with her two daughters.

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan. Her first book translation, also published with And Other Stories, was Susana Moreira Marques's Now and at the Hour of Our Death.