Friends in Funchal

Fiction & Literature

With selection notes

Distant Music

Lee Langley

English · 2003 edition

A love story spanning six centuries, opening in 1429 on a Madeira consumed by a fire that has blazed for seven years, as a peasant girl and a Jewish boy off a Portuguese ship meet — their thwarted love recurring across generations.

Fiction & Literature

With selection notes

Tango in Madeira

Jim Williams

English · 2013 edition

Set in Madeira after WWI, a disillusioned ex-soldier tries to rescue his family’s failing wine business as the island fills with real figures of the era — an exiled emperor, Agatha Christie at Reid’s Hotel, George Bernard Shaw learning to tango — and a murder draws him in.

Fiction & Literature

Black Kestrel

Don Silva

English · 2006 edition

An adventure novel set in late-19th-century Madeira, following a young peasant who rebels against a feudal landlord, conscription and militant priests, fighting for freedom alongside the woman he loves.

Fiction & Literature

Chipset

Lior Samson

English · 2012 edition

Tech journalist Karl Lustig travels to Madeira to lecture at the university and deliver military microchips — and stumbles onto a dangerous puzzle hidden in the chipset. A techno-thriller set largely on the island.