Straddling the testimonial narrative and essay, The Hangover of Memory (“La resaca de la memoria”) tells the story of a character referred to as “I.” An “I” in the third person who, belonging to the second generation of Chile’s dictatorship, is permeated by the memories of others and by the traces of a receding memory. The book’s title, The Hangover of Memory, reflects this phenomenon and points to the double meaning of the word “hangover”: the debris left behind by ocean waves, and the malaise one wakes up with (or, in this case, is born into) the day after intoxication.
The daughter of survivors who sought refuge in Mexico, “I” extends the exile in France, as if fleeing a tragic family destiny. Indeed, “I” is also the niece of Miguel Estay, alias El Fanta: one of the most emblematic and controversial perpetrators of the dictatorial period. Sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, this former left-wing militant betrayed dozens of members of the Communist Party, and ultimately participated voluntarily in one of the most atrocious crimes of that era, the so-called “Case of the Throats Slashed.”
“I,” the daughter of victims, explores the remnants of imprisonment, torture, and exile clinging to her skin, trying to identify everything that binds her to the other “stragglers of memory” of her generation. “I,” the perpetrator’s niece, delves into that other grim zone of History, asking what part of that legacy belongs to her and how to confront it from an ethical and political standpoint. In search of her family past, the character thus embarks on an adventure: she returns to Chile, joins the 2019 social uprising, meets other descendants of genocidaires, co-founds a collective with them, encounters some of her uncle’s victims, and discovers the existence of an unknown cousin—the daughter of the perpetrator.
To invent one’s own narrative amid secrets, distortions, lies, and unbearable truths: such is the challenge she is confronted with—a challenge as immense as the price to be paid.

A country in the throes of dictatorship, a repressive group operating in the shadows: torture, murder, disappearances, clandestine detention centres. And a young soldier, Andrés Valenzuela. Papudo, his village. “Papudo”, his nickname. A young soldier who gradually descended into hell.
One morning, he decides to ‘tell everything, spit it all out, down to the last detail. Even if they come after me. Even if they kill me for deserting.’ ‘It doesn’t really matter: you’re already dead. They stole your soul.’
Andrés Valenzuela was the only agent who, while on active duty, deserted after handing over information to the Vicariate of Solidarity about the structure and extermination practices implemented by the secret organisation of which he was a member. Here is the story of a living dead man. And what happened before: a humble childhood, dreams and fantasies, friends from the neighbourhood, a fisherman father. And what happened after: the strangeness of exile, clandestinity, heartbreak, guilt – always guilt. Many journalists, writers, and filmmakers have endeavoured to tell the story of Papudo, the torturer; Papudo, the murderer; Papudo, the penitent. The story of Papudo, the man, is now told by him.

This book gives voice to Andrés Valenzuela, a deserter from the Air Force Intelligence Service and former operative agent of the Joint Command during the Pinochet dictatorship. Assuming the paradox of someone else’s autobiography, it collects his last and longest testimony, sealed by a letter in his own handwriting. Why did you break down? Why at that moment and not before? Why you and not others?
From Papudo to Hell. Autobiography of Andrés Valenzuela Morales (“De Papudo al infierno. Autobiografía de Andrés Valenzuela Morales”) raises these and other questions.

In Queen of the Tamarugal (“Reina del Tamarugal”), once a year, when the Virgin of Carmen sets out to travel across her pampas, the town of La Tirana fills with pilgrims who dance for her and followers who celebrate her with devotion.
Fran, a woman in her thirties, arrives from the city to film a documentary about this religious festival. She uses the trip as a way to distance herself from the mounting pressure of organizing her wedding.
Cristi, a local teenager, turns her grandmother’s house into a parallel celebration with her friends — reggaeton, drugs, and alcohol — running alongside the town’s ecstatic festivities.
Fran’s melancholic gaze — and her camera — capture the faces, costumes, and fervour of the dancers, while Cristi’s frustration with her boyfriend, who flirts with drug trafficking, disrupts the fragile, unseen balance beneath the crowd, the music, and the folklore.
Malu Furche R., with her clear and visual prose, tells a story for the digital age: two voices that almost never meet but watch, follow, and affect each other without knowing it. In this, her debut novel, she opens the desert to two women who seek silence as an escape from pressure.

Heat Islands (“Islas de calor”) unfolds in a world where the climate crisis has spiralled out of control. Rising temperatures have reshaped societies and forced humanity into a radically new way of life: water is a treasure, shade a salvation, night the new day, and daylight a forbidden space under military curfew.
Within this chaotic landscape, certain areas where concrete and buildings trap heat become literal “heat islands.” Like the stories in this collection, they contain the isolation and abandonment of those who suffer, the desperate attempts of people to find relief, and the cold opportunism of those willing to exploit others to survive. As the city’s fragments shift and burn in this man-made inferno, a spontaneous fire climbs the hill to the statue of the Virgin, stirring a sense of superstition and awe.
In her debut short story collection, written in sharp and vivid prose, Malu Furche R. envisions a world on the brink—one that refuses to end quietly, as its inhabitants continue to adapt even to a universal catastrophe.

La Santita (“The Saint”) is an opening of cosmopoetic worlds in which the frontiers between body and spirit, culture and nature, feminine and masculine, playful and rational, science and magic fade away. In seven stories, the author organises universes in which mangroves, chickens, volcanic rocks, ashes, Obi-Wan Kenobi or Cristal meet and weave links that bring into play the existence of other realities (not necessarily Western) that escape the limits of time and space and the living and the dead. Inspired by the cosmologies of the Andean world and its deep violences, Moscoso makes magic with words, invents rhythms and brings references from popular culture together with another ancestral pop culture.
A puzzle of references so recognisable in Moscoso’s imaginary and in so many places in America. Posters of Chayanne and Hello Kitty among precarious dwellings, random vegetation, empty lots, houses made of unpainted and unplastered bricks, endless cities and buildings that shine in the sun, the smell of fried food and coriander. Neon and cumbia. Virgins and Star Wars. We are, perhaps, facing a literature of the end of the world.

A jaguar kills a man in the middle of the forest by the Brazilian Atlantic coast, in the heart of the nature reserve Arraial do Sana. Three siblings, Alan, Alex and Betina reunite to organize the funeral of their father, Zé Maria, after his tragic death. Alex, the eldest, arrives by car with Emma, his French wife. He has apparently made something of himself. Alberto, the middle sibling, arrives in women’s clothing and now goes by the name of Betina. The story is told by Alan, the youngest, who claims to be studying medicine in Rio. Actually, he has turned to literature and wants to become an author. In his narrative, he alternately addresses the mother and the siblings.
The recently deceased father was obviously not a saint in his own home, as the title suggests. On the contrary, he was only perceived as a saint outside his own family, in the little town where he lives, was liked by many and, thanks to his knowledge of the forest plants, a respected healer. For his wife Rute, on whom he continuously inflicted violence, and his three children, he was the devil. While the town holds a procession to bid farewell to a beloved resident, Rute and her children go through the complexities of mourning between longing and the marks of oppression.
Home Saint (“Santo de Casa”) touches on deep wounds and exemplifies how much the patriarchal system precariously affects the subjectivity of men themselves.

At the cost of losing his freedom, a man goes to the police to confess to a murder, whose victim, he claims, is hidden in the heart of the Atacama desert. From there, a whirlwind of unexpected events begins that will captivate the reader. Detectives who are working against time and an average citizen whose motives for turning himself in are unknown. The desert as a silent witness to a chilling event.
Once again, Carlos Pinto delves into his characters’ psyche to explore those dark labyrinths where the beast that sleeps in each of us resides. The Path of the Beasts (“El camino de las bestias”) is inspired by real events and suggests that this animality could surface in any of us, when we least expect it.

A medical student performing clandestine abortions becomes involved in the death of a pregnant young woman who dies during one of his procedures. When accused of stealing supplies from his university, he takes advantage of this minor offense to spend a brief period in prison, thus avoiding investigation into the young woman’s death. Ignoring his warnings, his girlfriend decides to continue the macabre business despite her lack of knowledge.
Veteran detective Facundo Pineda becomes the main threat to the couple due to his persistence and intuition, insisting on finding the links between two very different incidents that will bring him closer to the truth. But what initially seems like just another case in his career turns into a real nightmare, threatening to drag down those around him.
In The Garden of the Innocents (“El jardín de los inocentes”), journalist Carlos Pinto draws inspiration from a dramatic real case to unveil the dark secrets of two individuals that, after making poor decisions, cross the limits of ethics, morality, and legality.

The Silence of the Damned (“El silencio de los malditos”) is based on a real case. A journalist gains access to a dangerous convict who no one has ever managed to interview before. In a cramped interrogation room inside the prison, he starts to tell a story that goes beyond a confession and becomes a one-way journey into the inscrutable dominion of a criminal mind. The man has committed a horrendous murder, without any apparent cause, but it unveils a life of deprivation, pain, and revenge. Carlos Pinto applies his mastery to literature in order to descend into the depths of hell that are the human condition. It’s a striking first novel.

A man on the verge of death buys an abandoned church in the middle of the Namib desert in Angola, built next to a vertiginous cliff overlooking the Atlantic. His name is Leopoldo G. Borges — geologist and poet, celebrated in his country for his lucidity and rebelliousness. In the last months of his life, he decides to undertake his most daring excavation yet — not into rock, but into his own soul. In the quietcalm of the mineral world, he writes a feverish diary, where poems, memories, visions and omens intertwine. In the basement of the ruined chapel, he discovers an intact replica of the church, an inverted reflection that seems to exist outside of time, where death waits patiently. Between these two worlds, the poet realises what is and has always been truly important: his ex-wife, who left him even though they still love each other, and his daughter Gaia, who after a quarrel with him disappeared in the desert more than three years ago and whose absence has become an open wound.

All About God (“Tudo Sobre Deus“) is a novel about death and wonder, about guilt and the possibility of forgiveness, about the love between a father and a daughter; about the art of saying goodbye and the miracle of enduring. A novel illuminated by the dazzling light of the desert, where reality, contaminated by fiction, becomes fluid and unreliable — inviting us to cross, hand in hand with the protagonist, the narrow border between what we call reality and the elusive territory of dreams.

I Want To Be Your Sundays. And Other Stories for the Restart of the World (“Quero Ser os Teus Domingos. E Outros Contos Para O Recomeço do Mundo“) is a book about the end of times and a guide to the world’s new beginning. In its pages you will meet characters who – like you, dear reader – feel confused, lost and frightened. Some of them see the angel of death coming, in one of his many forms; one of them tricks him by telling stories, because if in the beginning it was the verb, in the end it will also be the word, that is, fiction, that restarts the world. Or not. “Kâmia left me a note: ‘I want to be your Sundays, including Mondays.’ A few days later, she disappeared. I had the note framed. I put it on the wall in front of the front door. That way, I see it every time I enter the house and think: ‘Love is inconstant’.”

Leila Pinto is somewhere in the near future, writing a story that begins in 1902, on the central plateau of Angola, when a platoon of European soldiers is found lifeless in extremely mysterious circumstances. Leila tells the love story between her grandparents, Jan and Lucrécia, and in doing so gives us a glimpse of a possible (or impossible) history of the Kingdom of Bailundo and contemporary Angola.

A secret society of Ovimbundo warriors; a sorcerer-king; a woman who knows the secrets of invisibility; a soldier who wants to be a photographer. In the pages of this novel we meet (and almost meet) characters who are almost real, and others who are almost fictional, helping us to understand how a country is born – and how a country is lost, and how many fictions history is made of.

In Master of the Drums (“Mestre dos Batuques”), José Eduardo Agualusa discusses questions of identity and belonging; history and fiction; tradition and modernity; knowledge and power; the real and the imaginary; the nature of time and the purpose of existence, subverting stereotypes and preconceived ideas, while exposing some of the many contradictions, some tragic, others ironic, of the Portuguese colonial process. And he leaves us with a question: Can love triumph over war and chaos?

The Lives and Deaths of Abel Chivukuvuku. A Biography of Angola (“Vidas e Mortes de Abel Chivukuvuku. Uma Biografia de Angola”) is the story of a man whose name, Chivukuvuku, means bravery. A man married to a woman called Victória, and with three children: Pedro, Mário and Celma. A man born on 11 November (the date of Angola’s independence), who dedicated his entire life to fighting for the democratisation of his country. Abel Epalanga Chivukuvuku survived two plane crashes during the civil war, an assassination, and a terrible lynching attempt, without ever losing the joy of life and the ability to forgive, to listen to others and to enter into dialogue. His story is also the story of Angola, as seen from Bailundo, at the heart of the Ovimbundo nation.
The book is a major contribution to Angolan history and highly recommended for anyone who wants to better understand contemporary Angolan history, especially its ambiguities.

The Living and the Rest (“Os Vivos e os Outros”) follows the story of Agualusa‘s previous novel The Society of Reluctant Dreamers: Daniel has been living with the artist Moira in her native Mozambique for three years now, on the coastal Ilha de Moçambique.

They are awaiting the birth of their child, and at the same time they are organizing the island’s first literary festival. The small town with colonial charm is somewhat run down after years of civil war, but still constitutes a hub of African, Arab and European culture. As soon as the first festival-goers arrive, the coast is hit by a cyclone.

The island is spared, but the mainland sinks under rain and mud. The bridge to the mainland becomes impassable, and telephone and internet connections are down. The islanders, and with them the writers who have been invited to the festival, are cut off from the outside world and left to their own devices. The authors talk, eat and drink, get closer to each other, hear ghostly voices and meet characters from their own books. Some believe themselves to be in an intermediate realm, a kind of limbo, and some begin to write. The boundaries between reality and fiction, between past and future, between life and death become blurred. After five days everything goes back to normal, but the world has become a different place.

Where do we go when it’s all over? Perhaps to a small island. As one of the characters in this novel says, „after the world ends, it will start again on the islands“. This is a novel about the nature of life and of time, and the extraordinary power of imagination and the written word, capable of creating anything and regenerating everything.

Between 2018 and 2021, what changed in our lives, what transformed – for better and for worse – our world? In this book, José Eduardo Agualusa brings together short stories, newspaper columns and diary entries written (and published in the Brazilian and Portuguese press) during this period. They are texts that reflect the strange, convulsive and somewhat mysterious times we have been living through, while trying to shed some light on days that are still to come. Tiptoeing between fiction and essays, without too much concern for respecting borders (on the contrary, exploring the no man’s land that lies between borders), The Most Beautiful End of the World (“O Mais Belo Fim do Mundo”) is divided between journalism, short stories and texts where we hover above that dividing line between present and future, between the past and the time at we reflect upon it.

Thus, there is the memory of books that awaken our recollections, along with interstellar journeys, shepherds in the desert, trees, films and music, the lives of writers, memories of Covid, cities that cannot be forgotten, generals who don’t like war, cats, the presence of people whose lives could make a novel, journeys that are already impossible, hippopotamuses in the sea, fears that flutter like ghosts. An idea about how, despite tragedies, the world does not end.

The Elegant Terrorist (And Other Stories) (“O Terrorista Elegante e Outras Histórias”) is made up of three stories based on theatre plays written jointly by José Eduardo Agualusa and Mia Couto, commissioned by the theatre groups A Barraca, from Lisbon, and Trigo Limpo – Teatro ACERT, from Tondela in Northern Portugal.

In The Elegant Terrorist, which gives its title to the book, an Angolan is arrested in Portugal for his alleged participation in acts of terrorism. The man claims to be able to fly and talks to a bird in prison, which seems to give him the necessary guidance to fulfil his mission. – „I come here to kill.“ This is how the protagonist of It Rains Love in the Street of the Killer (“Chovem Amores na Rua do Matador”), the second story, finally tries to make peace with his past: by killing the three women in his life. The city night plunges into chaos and, as the conflict unfolds in the dark streets, a masked stranger looks for someone to kill. In Black Box (“A Caixa Preta”), generations of the same family are forced to face their best-kept secrets. Three delicious short novellas, full of humourand suspense, by two of the most popular and renowned fiction authors in Portuguese.

The Angolan journalist Daniel Benchimol dreams of people he does not know. Moira Fernandes, a Mozambican artist based in Cape Town, stages and photographs her own dreams. Hélio de Castro, Brazilian neuroscientist, films them. Hossi Kaley, a hotelier and former guerrilla with a dark and violent past, has a very different and even more mysterious relationship with his dreams. Dreams bring these four characters together in a dramatic sequence of events, in a country dominated by a totalitarian regime on the verge of complete breakdown.

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers (“A Sociedade dos Sonhadores Involuntários”) is a political, satirical and entertaining fable that challenges and questions the nature of reality, while advocating the rehabilitation of the dream as an instrument of consciousness and transformation.

José Eduardo Agualusa’s long-awaited novel Queen N’jinga (“A Rainha Ginga”) tells the life of one of the most fascinating historical personalities of Angola.

Africa, early 17th century: Father Francisco comes to assist N’jinga in her duties as ambassador of her brother the king, at a time of great historical turbulence. Accompanying N’jinga in her rise to power, Francisco discovers a completely new world and questions everything he believes in, even his Catholic faith, when he falls in love with one of the women of N’jinga‘s court.

An African account of the colonization of Angola that sheds new light on the roles of slavery, religion, inquisition and the complex network of relationships between Europe, Africa and the New World. A great adventure story by one of Angola’s most important voices. The novel has already sold over 30,000 copies in Portugal!

A General Theory of Oblivion (“Teoria geral do esquecimento”) tells the true story of Ludo, a Portuguese woman who, horrified by the ongoing events of the Angolan War of Independence in 1975, bricks herself into her apartment in Luanda for almost thirty years. Interlinking Ludo’s tale with the moving stories of other characters and writing with a subtle irony that emphasizes the amazing coincidences of life, Agualusa creates a convincing and charming whole.

José Eduardo Agualusa’s juvenile novel Life in the Sky (“A Vida no Céu”) tells the extraordinary story of 16-year-old Carlos, who was born in the skies and goes looking for his father.

When the earth becomes too hot to live on after excessive global warming, people start building whole balloon cities in the sky. Carlos himself was born in a floating colony called Luanda. When his father disappears after a tragic balloon accident, Carlos is certain he survived. Travelling on his own in his family’s balloon, he discovers a floating Paris full of unknown wonders, makes friends and falls in love for the first time. But will he also find his father?

Full of adventure, mystery and passion, Life in the Sky is a moving book about friendship that addresses pressing sociological and ecological topics in an elegant and intriguing way.

Personal Notebook of Miracles (“Milagrário pessoal”) is both a beautiful and unusual love story and a journey across the history of the Portuguese language.

One day Iara, a young Portuguese linguist who investigates neologisms, makes an incredible discovery: The Portuguese language is infiltrated with amazingly familiar sounding new words, which are suddenly used all over the country. In an attempt to find out where they come from or who has possibly invented them, she asks her professor, an 80-year-old Angolan anarchist, for help. Together they go looking for a mysterious list of words which, according to a document from the 17th century, were once stolen from the language of the birds. On their journey to Brazil, where they hope to find hints, they steadily get closer. Both have a rather turbulent past: Iara was a model and got robbed by her boyfriend, now distrusting any man. The professor was married to a French girl he got to know in the Spanish Civil War. After only a few years, she was killed in an accident. Their relationship is very easy-going, and in spite of the professor’s age, Iara seeks comfort in his apparent admiration of her. The professor keeps a diary where he notes down events which stand out in his daily routine, as small as they may seem.
Needless to say, Iara’s name appears frequently in his “Milagrário Pessoal”. As they dicover seemingly helpful leads in their search for the strange new words, they delve deeper and deeper into the origins of the Portuguese language. When the professor remembers some letters which might give insight into the language of the birds, they start searching through his library – without success, however, as the professor has known all along: He himself has hidden the one document which might help them, the list of the mysterious words itself. As a descendant of its author, he has used the secret words to get Iara’s attention, deliberately spreading them. Having violated the rules imposed by the ancient keepers of these words, he now has to face the consequences and return to Angola. But he returns content, for he has had all he ever dreamed of: A second chance for love and a night of passion with Iara.

Personal Notebook of Miracles confirms Agualusa as a great writer. This book is a declaration of love to the Portuguese language.

Tropical Baroque (“Barroco tropical”) tells a passionate love story hurtling inevitably towards an abyss, just like the Angolan society in which it is set. Bartolomeu is a well-known author and filmmaker, his girlfriend Kianda an internationally celebrated singer. When the famous television presenter Núbia de Matos dies a violent death after openly addressing child abuse and drug use among the country’s powerful men, Bartolomeu decides to investigate her murder…

Moving between fiction and reality, in My Father’s Wives (“As mulheres do meu pai”) José Eduardo Agualusa tells the story of the musician Faustino Manso, who, at his death, left eight widows and eighteen children in different cities and countries across Africa. Laurentina is a film director who lives in Lisbon. When her mother dies, she leaves a letter telling how Laurentina was adopted in Angola and that her real father was Faustino Manso. Laurentina decides to go to Africa to find out more about the father she never knew, and to make a documentary about the life of the late musician.

Together with a group made up of her boyfriend Mandume, her newfound nephew Bartolomeu, her photographer Jordi and the driver of their ancient vehicle, Pouca Sorte, they set out from Luanda, the Angolan capital, heading for Mozambique, via Namibia and South Africa. The narration through the eyes of the different characters and their different perspectives leads the reader on a journey across modern-day Africa and into its historical roots, through times of political struggle and a still-present sense of mysticism. The idea of the African Male is deconstructed as the narration progresses, in a very human manner, bringing to light the power held by African women.

Laurentina returns to Lisbon at the end of the long journey, pregnant and certain that Faustino Manso was sterile. My Father’s Wives is a journey that takes the reader to Africa in its music, cooking, passions and landscapes. Through his depiction of the harsh reality of an Africa that is still suffering from the wounds of its difficult past, Agualusa brings out simply the richness of these countries and their inhabitants, making a refreshing change from the gloomy news of the international media.

On the sands of Itamaracá, an old fisherman dreams of fish: shad in the morning, when the water’s smooth and silvery, the Atlantic tarpon after it rains, and a jack when the sea goes blue. Elsewhere, Borges sulks away in a plantation of neverending banana tree, and the president of the United States wakes from a coma speaking only Portuguese. Vividly translated by long-time Agualusa collaborator Daniel Hahn, the jewel-like tales gathered in this collection are an exuberant celebration of story-telling in all its various forms. With A Practical Guide to Levitation (“Manual Prático de Levitação”), Agualusa offers a sly wink to the fictional quality inherent in all narratives, whether they’re fishermen’s tales, national histories, or the stories we tell ourselves.

The novel The Book of Chameleons (“O vendedor de passados”) has been drawing a lot of attention since its publication and has been reprinted several times. The albino Félix Ventura lives in Luanda in a big house full of books and earns his living by offering an altogether unusual service: he invents pasts. After decades of war, Angola is undergoing rapid change. It is home to many people with absolutely unimaginablecareers, but their pasts are not always quite presentable if they want to have a promising future. So Félix Ventura invents acceptable pasts for several people – they all receive a family register with family photographs and the necessary documents. The omniscient narrator tells the story from a rather intriguing perspective: that of a lizard. In the fiction of reconstructed pasts much turns out to be real. With ironic nudges and winks, Agualusa holds up a mirror to his country and stages a complex confusion in which truth and lies, reality and fiction lead to a surprising end.

The story, a tangled mesh of facts and fiction, tells of the disappointment of the two protagonists, which represents the disappointment of a whole nation, Creole Nation (“A Nação Crioula”) the title of the work betrays its agenda. However, this time the book is not just about Angola: the hero of the novel, the Portuguese writer and globe-trotter Carlos Fradique Mendes, is as much at home in Lisbon as he is in Luanda or Rio de Janeiro, all of them part of the Portuguese-speaking Creole world. In Angola he falls helplessly in love with Ana Olímpia Vaz de Caminha, who was born a slave and yet became one of the country’s richest women.

Agualusa’s first book The Conspiracy (“A Conjura”) was published in 1989. It is a historical novel set in São Paulo de Luanda in the period between 1880 and 1911. Agualusa paints a fascinating portrait of a society marked by opposites, in which only those who can adapt have any chance of success. The necessary process of adaptation corresponds to that of creolization. By this Agualusa not only means mixing black and white, but above all, mixing different cultures, a theme on which this author, himself a Creole, focuses again and again in his subsequent works. The legitimate and illegitimate off-spring of mixed marriages always had a hard time of it, even in the late 19th century, caught as they were between two stools – colonial society and the world of the Africans. Yet it was they, more especially those of them who had a European education, who were the first to resist colonial domination.

The Queen of Absurdities (“A rainha dos estapafúrdios”) tells the adventures of Ana, a restless and curious young partridge in search of clothes more colourful than the ones that nature gave her. Alone, she deceives a hungry hyena, faces a ferocious lion and becomes queen of the savannah. How does she achieve all this? Discover these and many other adventures of the Queen of Absurdities in the colourful and magical pages of this book. This is a book to live every day of our lives.

Once upon a time there was a giraffe called Olímpia, who always walked with her head in the clouds, trying to see angels and eating stars, and Dona Margarida, a chicken from the bush with her head full of old sayings. They meet and become friends. They want to solve the problem of the drought that was ravaging their land. Would they succeed? With humour, mastery and simplicity, José Eduardo Agualusa and Henrique Cayatte tell us in The Giraffe That Ate Stars (“A girafa que comia estrelas”), a beautiful history of friendship and wit.

An inventor of impossible things: mechanical ants, steam-powered birds, flying shoes, sneezing devices, Oddballs and Oddities (“Estranhões & Bizarrocos”) and much else besides. Wise camels, a teddy girl, the queen of butterflies. A country where everything happens in reverse, rivers run from sea to source, and cats are the size of oxen. The birth of the first firefly in the world… These are stories to sleep angels.

A she-wolf who wants to be free, but can she survive without her pack? Lucy wants to escape from the territory of her father, a powerful and fearsome politician, who is also a prominent organized crime boss in northern Mexico. Her attempt to escape does not follow a well-defined plan, which is why she is captured by Treviño, one of her father’s faithful henchmen. But Lucy does not give up, even if in her escape she loses almost everything: her comfortable life, her handful of friends, her lovers, her bodyguard… Everything, except her gun. But this is only the beginning: in her tender years she will get to know degradation, death, misery, perhaps incest. Maybe her vague hope of escape will not come true. Maybe her wolf-pack is bigger than she imagines. Maybe there is no escape. But Lucy is nothing if not determined, and all her experiences give her new strength to take on whatever may happen.

She-Wolf (“Loba”) is a fast-paced and dizzying novel about the abysses of the human soul and Mexican society today, a novel that by its unlikely extremes gives you the most unexpected and clearest insights, and with a long-lasting reverberation in the reader’s mind.

Monterrey, north Mexico: By the side of the powerful drugs lord Julio, the student Fernanda lives an extravagant life: parties, sex, and plenty of money. In return she devotes herself unconditionally to her man, with a love that is to change to its cruel opposite when Julio is no longer the one Fernanda used to know.

Fernanda is a young woman who has everything and yet, haunted by her own past and the lack of control over her own life as the lover of a narcotics boss, she descends into a downward spiral of dependence and violence. Brave Bitch (“Perra Brava”) is a fast-paced, powerful novel, in which glamour, wealth and beauty are mere facades of corrupt Mexican society.

The young Sausan spends many hours in her father‘s library. Condemned to a life in the same place because of her health, she discovers the diversity of the world through her books. She is certain that if she ever marries, it will be to a man with a cosmopolitan mind and a love of stories in his heart. When three admirers ask her to marry them, she sets them a task: they are to travel far and wide for eight years and bring her back one hundred birds at the end of that time. Sausan is convinced that people who live in a society characterised by conflict and enmity are unable to understand the true meaning of love. For this reason, she sends her three admirers far away. Set in the bloody period between 1988 and early 2000, Sausan witnesses the uprising against the regime that rules her country. Bachtyar Ali, known for his narrative art and stories full of magic, in Mansion of the Sad Birds (»Kshki Balinde Xemginekan«) delves deep into the soul of society in order to counter the emergence of violence in his region of origin.

Djamshid Khan has become thin behind thick prison walls. As light as paper, so that one day a gust of wind catches him and carries him away, beyond the walls of the prison and out into the wide world. Time after time he blows away, and time after time he begins a new life. In the army, as a ghost, as a prophet, as a lover, as a flying attraction – countless eddies carry the man away until he himself no longer knows who he once was and where he belongs. Only his nephew is looking for him, and for something that will return his uncle to his roots.
My Uncle Jamshid Khan: Who Has Always Been Taken by the Wind (“Jemşîd xanî mamim: ke hemîşe ba legel xoyda deybird”) is a weightless, touching, and also tragic story about getting lost, starting over and about the question of where we are actually heading.

In parallel with his groundbreaking novels, Bachtyar Ali has been publishing numerous essays and studies for decades. With The Dictator’s Smile (“Dwa xandai Diktator”), we discover him as a keenly observant, radical, and thought-provoking analyst. The central question is what obstacles stand in the way of enlightenment and peaceful development in the Middle East and the Arab world. Based on his own experiences and familiar with European traditions of thought, Bachtyar Ali seeks new ways to explain the omnipresent violence and fatal lack of perspective in his region.

When the flute is pressed into little Jaladat’s hand for the first time, he immediately elicits the sounds of the instrument, and everyone is enchanted. The old Sufi Ishaki Lewzerin takes Jaladat and his friend to the mountains to pass on his secret knowledge.

When the war and the bombing raids begin, the three flautists wander from village to village. Playing in a dance band in a huge, nameless city of brothels, Jaladat has to unlearn all his art of playing the flute, so as not to attract attention. The enigmatic girl Dalia protects him, initiates him in her secrets, and leads him to a path into the depths of his land, beyond our imagination.

The City of the White Musicians (“Shari Mosiqare Spiyekan”) is the monumental novel of a world in which death is ubiquitous and the arts bring unexpected salvation.

“Whenever he told lies, the birds would fly away. It had been that way since he was a child. Whenever he told a lie, something strange would happen.” So begins The Last Pomegranate Tree (»Duwahamin Hanary Dwniya«). Muzafar, a peshmerga fighter, has spent the last twenty-one years imprisoned in a desert yearning for his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was captured. Upon his release, he begins a frantic search, only to learn that Saryas was one of three identical boys who became enmeshed in each other’s lives as war mutilated the region. An inlet to the recesses of a terrifying historical moment, and a philosophical journey of formidable depths.

Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1980s: Two sisters, full of life and desire for freedom, face two different destinies in a city isolated by war. Parwana rebels, breaking with traditional conventions; Khandan loves and admires her older sister. In a complex social and political setting, where religion wields great influence, Parwana‘s only dream is to leave the country. When she runs away with her lover Feridoun to a remote mountain area called Ashqstan,  Khandan is sent with other girls who have sinful relatives to a special religious school. In a skilful blend of fantasy and reality, the author deftly portrays both the world of the runaway lovers and the confines of a strict religious school.

Parwana and Feridoun join a group of runaway lovers, all of them trying to escape from their oppressive families. But they seem to be unable to build a happy community because they have brought too much of the outside world with them. Finally, the religious extremists find and attack Ashqstan. Parwana is killed, and Khandan forced to watch. The evening later comes to be known as Parwana’s Evening (“Ewaray Parwana“).

For four more years Khandan lives in a strict Islamic school, where she has to learn how to subdue her soul and her body, so she doesn’t go the same way as her sister. After the first Gulf War, she leaves the school and sees the changes in the world after a destructive war. Her only wish is to find out her sister’s lost story, the story of the courage of somebody who followed her hopes without fearing death. Her journey draws Khandan into a search for a God who does not oppose love, a God who has been missing from her life for so long.

The whole novel is an insightful journey through the soul of Middle Eastern society, its divisions and fatal fallings out; an interpretation of the fanatical and strictly religious side set against the desire to live freely without restrictions from religious and social forces.

Iraqi Kurdistan at the turn of the twenty-first century is a territory ruled by strongmen, revolutionaries, fixers, bureaucrats and the “Barons” who control everything from livestock and land to Kurdish cultural life.

Defying the absolute power wielded by the Barons, a band of friends led by a poet embarks on an odyssey to find the bodies of two lovers killed unjustly by the authorities. The Barons respond by attempting to crush these would-be avengers, though their real war is waged against the imagination itself – a prized, elusive commodity for which intellectuals, merchants, political elites and humble workers all search in one way or another.

I Stared at the Night of the City („Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination“)  is a trip, in more ways than one: a tale of extraordinary people traveling great distances, in their minds or with their feet. It is a lyrical interpretation of contemporary Kurdistan, so much in the news nowadays but otherwise so little understood. Told by several unreliable narrators in a kaleidoscope of fragments that all eventually cohere, the novel manages the neat trick of dipping readers into a fantasia just long enough before wrenching them back to hard, cold ‘real life’.

Periscope

Durruti is a feared and respected figure in the criminal underworld. His business involves stolen cars, dismantling them and selling their parts, and other related activities, typical of his field. But above all, his business is keeping order: ensuring that no one does anything he doesn’t approve of, that the police and the political authorities, with whom he has a cast-iron pact, are not forced to overact and break the criminal harmony by actions that aren’t part of the script. It isn’t easy to keep everyone in line. It would only take one spark in the wrong place at the wrong time to upset the balance.
Life unfolds. A man is jealous of his wife and follows her with unexpected consequences. A mother is happy about her daughter’s promotion, unaware that she isn’t exactly working as a secretary in that sought-after downtown apartment. Her sister always wanted her to learn her spiritual wisdom from her; who knows, it might have saved the young woman.
The spark ignites; that disturbance, slowly, precipitates others; each one greater than the last. The younger foot-soldiers murmur and stop following orders; the neighbourhood becomes unsettled; outbursts and improvisation take over. The spiral of violence expands and encircles them all. Suspicion replaces secrecy and respect; the old order is shaken, waiting for a new one to arrive, and this is not necessarily good news.
In Scrapyard (“Desarmadero”), Eugenia Almeida makes full use of the codes of the noir series to construct a storyline where corruption and crime reach all layers of society. With terse writing and an extraordinary mastery of the oral register, she tells a great story based on small events that produce uncontrollable consequences. Its plot could be set in any Argentinean city, its characters scrambling to escape the abyss that opens up before them.
The final sentence sounds both consoling and optimistic: “I am going to help you”. But in reality, it condemns the poor devil to whom it is addressed to never again being free in his life, as had happened to Durruti because of his love for his little brother, the Nene, and as will happen to everyone because the system is bigger than all of them.

A personal alphabet that aims to find the meaning of writing in a cluster of stories that connect with her life through secret passages. This is the form that Eugenia Almeida gives Flooding. The Secret Language We Are Made Of (“Inundación. El lenguaje secreto del que estamos hechos”), a book that crosses genres, dragging and revealing traces of experience, strands of stored emotions, voices, absences, desires.
The author writes Flooding as a long, wide-ranging letter, at a solitary fair, to a recipient who Almeida herself postulates, consolidates and enchants in their existence, with the passionate commitment of “that function of the species”, which is language. The pleasures and displeasures of an act of writing that is done “with the whole body”.

Eugenia Almeida’s superbly written crime novel Threshold Tension (“La tensión del umbral”) is both a gripping story and an astute study of human behaviour.

Guyot, a brilliant but headstrong journalist with a tragic personal history, becomes obsessed with the suicide of a woman whose motives for killing herself seem connected to past events: a series of alleged murders and suicides relating to a highly feared criminal in league with the military. But what really happened? And how is Julia, the suicide victim, connected to those events? As Guyot digs deeper, the dark secrets about the desaparecidos begin to surface. At the same time more and more of those he involves in the case end up dead or injured. When his new lady friend Vera is threatened, Guyot has to make a painful decision.

Written in refreshingly straightforward language, this novel keeps the reader’s attention with its strong characters and the sheer force of its carefully constructed storyline.

The Room at the Back (“La pieza del fondo”) tells the quiet and tender story of a group of people who live on the edge of society and are still able to show solidarity to each other, in spite of pain and loneliness. An old and dishevelled man sits on the same bench every day, unmoving and silent. Only Sofía, a harassed waitress in a run-down bar, tries to help. When he disappears, a whole set of parallel events are set in motion.

The Bus (“El colectivo”): A small town in the Argentinean provinces. A bar, where an unknown couple are waiting for the bus. As are Marta and Antonio Ponce, whose sister wants to depart. Clouds are drawing close in the sky, without bringing rain, as always. But something peculiar happens: The barriers of the railway crossing, abandoned long ago, are lowered and the bus roars past the bar without stopping. No one can leave the little town.

The Ponces have lived here for 32 years – as a wealthy lawyer, Antonio, seemingly on the wrong side of the rails, in the poor quarter. At the time, Marta became pregnant and Ponce felt obliged to ask for her hand in marriage. When she lost the child, it seemed too late to him to cancel the wedding. But she hadn’t even wanted to marry him and confessed she had only given in to him that night out of pity. This he never forgave her. He sought revenge by forcing her to a monotonous life at his side.

The accelerating bus turns into a spectacle, drawing in larger crowds every night. Confusion prevails, only the lovers make their way on foot along the rails. In the meantime, at the small police station, incidents follow in quick succession. Orders are now given by the military and at dead of night it comes to a shootout on the railway tracks. The next morning, the barriers are lifted; the Ponces are once more on their way to the bar, for once again, the bus stops for the passengers. At last it rains. The newspapers report the death of two dissidents. Who could ever be able to recognise the couple from the bar on the blurry photograph?

In sober prose, the author draws on her diffuse childhood memories of the dictatorship, to tell of internal and external suppression and its fatal consequences.

Germano Alemeida’s new novel Misfortunes of a Governor in the Tropics (“Infortúnios de Um Governador nos Trópicos”) is set in the 1820s. Colonel João da Mata Chapuzet, who had distinguished himself as a brave military man, especially in the war against the French invaders (he was one of the royal family’s escorts when they fled to Brazil, but he himself returned immediately to Portugal to take part in the war), was appointed military governor of the always half-abandoned colony of Cape Verde. His main mission was to bind the colony tightly to the mother country, putting a stop to a handful of renegades who wanted to integrate the islands into a greater Brazil that was already seeking independence.
And after organising his large retinue in Lisbon, he set off, arriving without any major mishaps at the new capital of the islands, Vila da Praia. Here João da Mata proved to be as skilful and effective in politics as he had been in war. But he forgot that putting things in good order begins with ourselves, with our own house. And in this respect everything went wrong for him.

With The Faithful Dead (“O fiel defunto”), Almeida offers a snappy satire on the cultural scene in his Cape Verde homeland. Miguel Lopes Macieira, the island’s best-known and most-translated author, is shot dead by his friend Edmundo de Rosário at the launch of his first new book after years of silence. The jealous drama is centred on Matilde, thirty years younger than Macieira and loved by both men. The novel is less about solving a crime than about human relationships and how state and church want to share in the writer’s popularity. Finally it is Mariza, Macieira’s former companion who had always come second to literature during his lifetime, who gets the author’s will out of the safe. Around the sometimes grotesquely exaggerated events, Almeida creates a small cosmos of lovable characters with their own stories. Its language of a humorous, empathic narrative makes the novel unmistakable.

In his novels, Almeida unmasks the hypocrisy of public and private morality in the Republic of Cape Verde (and elsewhere). His most effective artistic tool is humour: Almeida is a master of all arts of literary comedy and his observations on society are sharpened by irony and sarcasm, puns and slap-stick-like situation comedy.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo (“O testamento do Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo”) is a highly witty and entertaining book telling about the life of a rich old-school macho on the Cape Verde islands. Amusingly enough, this man owes his economic and social progress to thousands of umbrellas which he once ordered by mistake. No one on the islands ever really needed an umbrella since it hardly ever rains. Fortunately though, this day the heavens were understanding and tore open just at the right moment…

In 2004 the novel was mentioned in the London TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT as one of the Best Books of the Year by Pankaj Mishra:

Germano Almeida’s The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo introduced me to a writer of great comic gifts.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo is the predecessor of the great novel My Poet (“O meu poeta”). Almeida’s third novel is entitled The Fantastic Island (“A ilha fantástica”) and in 1995 he published The Two Brothers (“Os dois irmãos”), a gripping story about a case of fratricide.

In his novel, Eva, Luís Henriques and Reinaldo, the narrator, are roaming the streets of Lisbon at night in December 2000. The occasion for their meeting is Eva. Both know her, and both know of each other from Eva’s stories. 25 years ago, she was Luís Henriques’ first love. Now he is curious to find out about this other man in her life. Is he a friend, or even a lover? The backdrop is Lisbon, from the 1960s onward to the Carnation Revolution, and the challenging life on Cape Verde against the background of more recent political developments. From a strictly Catholic bourgeois parental home, Eva moved to Lisbon to go to university, evidently exerting an irresistable charm on the male sex. Here she gets caught up in politics and meets and falls in love with Luís Henriques. After she returns to Cape Verde, she marries the candid Zé Manel without further ado, but embarks on a relationship with Reinaldo. Is it Eva, ultimately, who pulls the strings in all these relationships? The two men are faced with ever more questions and many remain unanswered when they part.

As in previous novels, Germano Almeida knows how to use a priceless story to tell the history of the Cape Verde Islands and their peoples.