I don't normally write reviews, but I feel the need to explain my rating. While I agree with previous reviewers that it is tough not to compare this to Comac McCarthy's "The Road" (though admittedly unfair), which I thought was more deftly executed, overall I can appreciate the significance of this book and what Saramago was trying to do. However, I found the experience of reading it just too difficult. The experience the characters live through is horrifying, and Saramago's precise descriptions of certain details, while necessary to make his point, were just too much for me. I much prefer, for example, McCarthy's circumscribed description of the fate of the people in the basement, which required some mental leaps on the reader's part, to Saramago's nothing-to-the-imagination explanation of what happened to the people in the grocery store storeroom. Also, I can appreciate the confusion of blindness conveyed by the prose style (lack of quotation marks, dialogue written in run-on-sentences so that it is not always clear who is speaking to whom), but I found it irritating to read. Overall, I thought this was an interesting and thought-provoking book, but not one that I would recommend to friends. I generally appreciate challenging literature, and indeed both "The Road" and "Children of Men" are favorites, but this book is one that I found myself glad to have finished.