LEARNING TO PRAY IN AGE TECH PA

In a city not quite of any particular era, a distant and calculating man named Lenz Buchmann works as a surgeon, treating his patients as little more than equations to be solved: life and death no more than results to be worked through without the least compassion. Soon, however, Buchmann#xE2;#xAC;"s ambition is no longer content with medicine, and he finds himself rising through the ranks of his country#xE2;#xAC;"s ruling party . . . until a diagnosis transforms this likely future president from a leading player into just another victim. In language that is at once precise, clinical, and oddly childlike, Gonc#xCC;#xA7;alo M. Tavares#xE2;#xAC;#x1D;the Portuguese novelist hailed by Jose#xCC; Saramago as the greatest of his generation#xE2;#xAC;#x1D;here brings us another chilling investigation into the limits of human experience, mapping the creation and then disintegration of a man we might call #xE2;#xAC;Sevil,#xE2;#xAC; and showing us how he must learn to adapt in a world he can no longer dominate.