The Stone Raft
1986 novel by José Saramago
The Stone Raft (Portuguese: A Jangada de Pedra) is a novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago. It was written in 1986, and was translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero in 1994. The premise of the novel is that the Iberian Peninsula has broken off the European continent and is floating freely in the Atlantic Ocean; bureaucrats around the world are forced to deal with the traumatic effects, while five characters from across Portugal and Spain are drawn ever closer to one another, embarking on a journey within the peninsula as the landmass journeys itself.
A Spanish-language film version titled La balsa de piedra was released in 2002. A Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese co-production, it was directed by Dutch director George Sluizer.
In 2021 it came to light that many lyrics of singer-songwriter Noel Gallagher of Oasis bear a strong resemblance to various lines from the novel, leading fans to believe that the book may have served as a device of lyrical inspiration throughout his songwriting career, in particular in the 1996 song "Underneath the Sky".
“The Stone Raft” enters the record as 1986 novel by José Saramago. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stone, Raft and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1171599. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1994, 2002 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Stone Raft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.