The Maias is considered by many to be the greatest and most epic Portuguese novel. Published in 1888 by Ernesto Chardron’s International Bookstore – an illustrious predecessor of Livraria Lello –, this novel accompanies three generations of a distinguished Lisbon based family, to tell us the day-to-day of all Portuguese nineteenth-century society, the same which in good measure we already were and still are to date, with a mixture of shame and pride, sometimes successive, not infrequently simultaneous.