Death with Interruptions

On the first day of a new year, in an unnamed country, nobody dies. Healthcare workers and funeral directors are left struggling with the consequences, and a criminal network starts quietly carrying the dying across the border, where they can finally pass away.

Then death, a woman who insists her name be written in lowercase, announces that people will die again, but each will be sent a letter a week in advance. One letter keeps coming back: a cellist who will not die, and death, drawn to him, begins to turn human.

José Saramago's satirical, philosophical fable, first published in Portuguese in 2005 and translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa (also published as Death at Intervals), reads as a meditation on mortality and love.