From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

Review 5-23-23 by Luis:
"Blindness" is the most captivating novel I have read in a long time, but also the one I closed with the most generous relief. It's an oppressive and nauseating atmosphere. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps!
Imagine a pandemic that, in a few weeks, strikes blindness to the population as a whole! The extraordinary and brutal dimension of the cataclysm prevents the establishment of any saving organization and generates absolute chaos.
Without water or electricity, the blind wander in disparate groups for scarce food in ransacked stores daily. The most vulnerable people die in the street amid abandoned cars and droppings. The still-hot corpses fall prey to starving dogs, enormous rats, and scavenging birds.
The reader accompanies a group of ten people, the first victims of the scourge which will quarantine, who, in their misfortune, has the unexpected luck of having a woman who can still see among them. The latter, out of prudence, pretends blindness, and only her husband, an ophthalmologist, is aware of this happy anomaly of fate.
With "Blindness," published in 1995, the future Nobel Prize winner José Saramago signs an incredibly realistic fiction in which bestiality quickly precedes all humanity. Fortunately, the altruistic behavior and intelligence of the doctor's wife somewhat attenuate the surrounding darkness!
Tiatia comments: I agree with the above review which was so well written. While I have read many dystopian noels, none seemed as real or as dreadful as this one. I wanted to read onward at the same time I wanted to close the covers. It gives one serious food for thought.

In a pretty painted box.