The year: 1936. Europe dances while Spain edges toward civil war and an invidious home-grown dictator establishes himself in Portugal. the city: Lisbon—gray, colorless, chimerical.

In the midst of this surreal setting is Ricardo Reis, a middle-aged doctor and poet who has returned to his native country after sixteen years in Brazil. Instead of receiving patients in an office, he spends hours walking steep, rain-filled streets. He has a love affair with the hotel chambermaid who slips into his bed at night. He is haunted by a young woman with a mysterious paralysis of her left hand. And he is visited by the ghostly presence of a celebrated poet, recently deceased. Can Ricardo Reis live in a world bent on destroying itself?