Description: Antonio Tabucchi's new novel The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro continues the experiment so successfully begun with his Pereira Declares (New Directions, 1994) -- a European best-seller and winner of the prestigious Aristeion European Literature Prize in 1997. Tabucchi has now written a thriller, but one with a subtle intellectual depth not usual in that genre. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro intriguingly reflects on current social issues: crime, police corruption, yellow journalism, and the courts -- both of the law and of public opinion.

Tabucchi hooks the reader on page one of this book and the story advances with electric and unflagging suspense. A gypsy discovers a headless body; Firmino, a young journalist who writes for a scandal-sheet, takes up the case; the headless corpse turns out to be that of one Damasceno Monteiro, an employee at an import-export company who, having stumbled upon a heroin smuggling ring at his work, had stolen a drug shipment; and, the police are supressing evidence -- all the stuff of familiar daily news, here made riveting in the hands of a rare and brilliant writer.

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943. After traveling widely and living in India and Portugal, he settled in his native Tuscany, where he presently holds the Chair of Literature at the University of Siena. The foremost Italian champion of Portuguese literature and the translator of Fernando Pessoa, Tabucchi is also the author of a considerable oeuvre which is published in many languages. He was awarded the Italian PEN Club prize for Requiem (ND, 1994).

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