"Somewhere within me I knew that, during these years as a prisoner, I had been in a sense sheltered from reality." Bill Griffiths lost both hands and both eyes when he was a prisoner of the Japanese in Java in 1942. But Bill had no intention of allowing himself to become an object of pity, and it was not long after his return to civilian life that he began to make it clear that, even if he had no hands and no eyes, he still had his own two feet and he certainly intended to stand on them. Inevitably, life has not been without its ups and downs, and certainly Bill could not have got where he was without the care and devotion of his wife Alice. Their story is one of remarkable courage, told with no trace of bitterness and a generous helping of laughter.

No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order. Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers. A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. This is not anarchy, this is blindness. ‘Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet’ Independent