Summary of Yann Martel's The High Mountains of Portugal is a novel comprised of three subtly but intricately linked novellas, each set in a different time period but culminating with a revelation of their interconnection. The protagonist of each novella is a man grieving the loss of his spouse:
In 1904, Tomás Lobo, a young man who has lost his father, lover, and son in the span of one week, sets out on a journey from Lisbon to northeast Portugal in an automobile—one of the first of its time. Tomás is an assistant curator intent on finding an iconoclastic relic he learned about in the journal of a seventeenth-century priest involved in the slave trade in Portuguese Angola…