How a Lawyer's Novel Reveals the Hidden Cost of Portugal's 48-Year Dictatorship

Portuguese lawyer and novelist Alice Brito has published a historical novel that excavates life under the Estado Novo dictatorship, using a clandestine Communist Party code phrase as its title—a signal that once meant someone had been arrested. Perdeu-se Relógio de Senhora (A Lady's Watch Is Lost) arrives in bookstores on May 11, 2026 via Companhia das Letras, her first release with the publishing house, and delivers an unflinching portrait of repression, surveillance, and the quietly radical act of survival for women in 1970s Lisbon.

The title alone is an archive fragment. "A lady's watch is lost" was the warning the Portuguese Communist Party posted in newspapers when a comrade had been detained—a phrase that triggered a cascade of safety protocols for those living underground. Brito discovered the code during research tied to her husband's work documenting political prisoners in Setúbal, where she herself lived. One case file stood out: a woman arrested on the very street where Brito's home now stands. That proximity sparked the fiction.

Three Women, One City, Zero Freedom

The narrative follows three women born in different decades—1922, approximately a decade later, and then another 10-20 years after that—whose lives converge by chance in a shared apartment on Avenida Duque d'Ávila in Lisbon, just before the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974. They come from disparate social classes and geographies, with no logical reason to meet. Yet all three carry the weight of Estado Novo's ideological machinery: the omnipresent PIDE (political police), colonial war anxiety, compulsory moral codes, and the suffocating grip on female autonomy.

One of the characters is rooted in a real person—Brito consulted civil registry records to reconstruct her biography—but changed the name, appearance, and details to fictionalize her fully. The other two are composites. Their stories span from birth to the regime's collapse, mapping how dictatorship inscribed itself onto daily routines: which books children read in school, how virginity was policed, what it meant to live unmarried, the legal consequences of dissent.

"This is not a pamphlet or an essay," Brito clarified in an interview. "It has characters, plot, and a happy ending—because April 25 happened."

Why This Matters

• Memory as resistance: With far-right rhetoric resurfacing across Europe, Brito positions historical fiction as a tool against amnesia—"a person without memory is mad," she argues, "not knowing where they come from or where they're going."

• Gender-specific repression: Women bore a double burden under Estado Novo: legal subordination and ideological control over sexuality, marriage, and public presence. The novel exposes how authoritarian regimes systematically target female agency.

• Local history, universal stakes: The Setúbal arrest that inspired the book underscores how dictatorship operated at the neighborhood level—surveillance was intimate, not abstract.

A Trend in Portuguese Letters

Recent works exploring the Estado Novo period and its legacy reflect a broader literary moment of historical reckoning. This literary wave reflects both generational transfer of trauma—children and grandchildren now telling stories their elders couldn't—and anxiety about political regression. In March, Brito was among Portuguese authors invited to the Leipzig Book Fair in Germany, coinciding with the German publication of her 2012 debut, As Mulheres da Fonte Nova (The Women of Fonte Nova).

The Lawyer Who Writes Fiction

Brito's day job shapes her prose. As a feminist lawyer, she encounters case files that "surpass any romanticized reality," stories so extreme they'd seem implausible if written down. The legal profession imposes what she calls a "straitjacket"—you can't indulge emotion in a court filing—but literature lets her repurpose the same human material with stylistic freedom.

Her courtroom experience informs the novel's depiction of subordination. "The different forms that women's subjugation can take—you wouldn't believe them unless you've seen the case files," she said. That forensic eye appears in her fiction: she documents how Estado Novo ideology regulated female existence down to the granular—dress codes, curfews, permissible speech.

Her previous works include O Dia em que Estaline Encontrou Picasso na Biblioteca (2015) and A Noite Passada (2019). Companhia das Letras describes her as "a unique voice defending the female condition without proselytism"—a careful phrasing that signals literary ambition over didacticism.

What This Means for Readers in Portugal

For anyone navigating Portugal's cultural landscape—whether longtime residents or newcomers—this novel offers two things: historical literacy and a template for vigilance. Understanding Estado Novo history provides essential context for contemporary debates about national identity, memorialization practices visible in place names and monuments, and the political discourse reshaping the country. Brito's research drew on the Torre do Tombo National Archive, which houses PIDE files documenting arrests, interrogations, and surveillance networks. That archive remains accessible, and exhibitions like Mulheres na Resistência à Ditadura em Setúbal (Women in the Resistance to Dictatorship in Setúbal) continue to surface individual stories of defiance—strikes, underground printing, emigration networks.

The book's publication coincides with a documented uptick in ultraconservative rhetoric in Portugal and across Europe. Brito expressed alarm at politicians invoking Salazar positively: "When someone says we need three Salazares, it's because they never lived under one." She views that as proof of memory collapse, the exact vulnerability her novel tries to correct.

The Code That Unlocked Everything

The clandestine signal that gives the book its title was more than a phrase—it was operational security embedded in language. Once the warning appeared in print, underground networks activated protocols: safe houses changed, contacts went silent, families braced for raids. Brito unpacks those procedures in the novel, showing how resistance required constant calculation of risk, a kind of cognitive labor that left no room for normal life.

That detail—the mechanics of staying one step ahead of the political police—grounds the fiction in the texture of lived fear. It's the difference between knowing dictatorships exist and understanding what it felt like to check a newspaper every morning to see if your name appeared in code.

The novel lands at a moment when Europe's memory infrastructure is under strain: survivors are aging, archives remain underfunded, and new generations lack visceral knowledge of authoritarianism. Brito's work functions as both literature and record—proof that the mundane bureaucracy of repression, the way it colonized kitchens and bedrooms and corner cafés, leaves traces that fiction can still retrieve.

In a country where 48 years of dictatorship (1926–1974) ended only half a century ago, the stakes of remembering remain immediate. "These are terrible times we're living in," Brito said, citing the far-right's electoral gains even among the economically vulnerable. "The possibility of a return to times like those narrated in the book—that terrifies me."

For readers, the novel offers diagonal access to that history: bold names, dates, procedural details that sketch the regime's architecture. It's a manual disguised as fiction, or fiction that refuses to forget it's also evidence. Either way, it's a book betting that the granular truth of repression—the codes, the registry offices, the shared apartments where strangers became conspirators—can inoculate against future forgetting.