A novel the Los Angeles Times Book Review called "a work of poetic and erotic genius from a master navigator of the human psyche," The Natural Order of Things is a tale of two families and the secrets that bind them. The voices of his characters--an army officer being tortured in prison on charges of conspiracy; an elderly man, once a miner in Mozambique, now reduced to dreams of "flying underground"; a diabetic teenage girl and the middle-aged husband she despises; the officer's illegitimate sister, locked away to haunt the house like Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre--create a portrait of a disintegrating Portugal, a personal political history that attains the brilliance and surreality of Elias Canetti and Nikolai Gogol.