Specifically, "As Intermitencias da Morte" (The Intermittencies of Death) is about what would happen if people stopped dying.
"All my books without exception deal with the improbable and the impossible," the Portuguese writer said at the novel's launch in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Thursday night.
The story depicts Death as a woman who goes on strike because she is fed up with being hated by people.
Chaos follows. Hospitals fill up, people keep growing old without dying, and the pension system overloads. Soon the church campaigns for Death to return.
"In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die," said Saramago, who will turn 83 next month.
"It is an extremely funny book. The reader will smile many times and even chuckle," he said.
Saramago's stories often deal with the fantastical and surreal. One of his best know previous works "Blindness" (1995) explores what happens when everyone in the world goes blind.
He won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1998 and has sold more than 30 million copies of his work in 30 different languages.
The new book in Portuguese goes on sale in Brazil this weekend and will also be released in Portugal and in Spanish in Spain and Latin America on November 11. No date has been announced for the English version."
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