Levantado do Chao.

"For the last couple of centuries, novels have been written mostly by middle-class writers for middle-class readers. The two great American novels of the oppressed, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath, are saved from that minatory coldness by the authors' passion for justice and their loving respect for their protagonists. The same is true of Portuguese author José Saramago's early novel, Raised from the Ground – with a tremendous bonus: the author is writing about people he grew up with, his own people, his family" (Ursula K. LeGuin). First published in 1980, Levantado do chao (Raised from the Ground) follows the changing fortunes of the Mau Tempo family—poor landless peasants not unlike Jose Saramago’s own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal known for its vast agricultural estates, the novel charts the lives of the Mau Tempos as national and international events rumble on in the background—the coming of the republic in Portugal, the two World Wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazar’s life.