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.

Everything in Major Santiago‘s life is about to change. After a traumatic accident that forces him to retire early, he feels the need to leave the capital and return to his childhood home in Benguela. There, his days are filled with memories and reflections on his family‘s history, along with Angola‘s colonial past and the profound social changes that have taken place. But his loneliness ends when Jeremias appears and, months later, Zacarias, an unusual dog and cat, who will accompany him in the new phase of his life. Also living in Benguela is Ofeka, the granddaughter of a soothsayer and caster of spells. When she was a child, her grandmother prophesied that her destiny would be to shine. Now that she is a beautiful woman with a successful career, her dead grandmother sends her a spirit to help her achieve her fantastical destiny. And Ofeka will never be alone again, because the impertinent spirit Olegário doesn‘t shy away from commenting even on her love life. When Santiago and Ofeka cross paths, they do not realise the extent to which their lives are intertwined, nor the unexpected revelations that await them. When the time comes, they will have to make a choice that will change their destiny and teach them that everything is connected. Or should be. And that what must be is connected only by words, spoken, written or transmitted. In clear prose punctuated by the magic of African traditions and a delightful sense of humour, Pepetela’s Everything-Is-Connected (»Tudo-Está-Ligado«) takes us on a journey from the establishment of the ancient kingdoms in the Central Plateau to present-day Angola, exploring little-known episodes in the country‘s history.

In His Excellency, R.I.P. (“Sua Excelência, de Corpo Presente”) an African dictator lies in a coffin in an enormous hall. He is dead, but sees, hears and thinks. Stretched out, imprisoned in a body without life, but in possession of his intellectual faculties, all he can do to pass the time is recall his life experiences with many of those who come to pay their last respects, among them several relatives, the first lady (and his other wives and mistresses), his numerous children and state dignitaries. In remembering his life, the path that led him to being president and his many years as head of state, he reveals us the meanderings of political power, the nepotism that consumed him and the various abuses allowed to those who supported him. And since he is aware of everything that goes on around him, and it is very difficult for a dictator to stop dictating, His Excellency not only speculates on those present and their political interests, but also tries to guess their thoughts and machinations. For even when dead, he will not leave his succession in the hands of others, instead trying to meddle with the help of his one-eyed spy, who is as faithful to him in death as he was in life.

Luanda, 1995: On the run from the horrors of civil war, thirteen-year-old Himba attempts to survive as a street child. After being raped and hurt, a well-intentioned local resident accommodates her and her friend Kassule at a church-run project. But soon Himba decides: You have always to fight for your own well-being. Nearly 20 years later, the growing globalization presents a new challenge for the young Sofia: Can her little restaurant withstand the economic competition? As she uses the death of her business partner to secretly appropriate her share, her greed will cost her the close relationship with her brother: Deeply disappointed by the machinations of Sofia, Diego turns away from his beloved sister. In If the Past Had No Wings (“Se o passado não tivesse asas”) Pepetela presents two strong female characters in two interwoven storylines. But the violence of war and the brutality of the subsequent struggle for survival are not easily shaken off. On the way from street kid to businesswoman, during Luanda’s development from theatre of war to cosmopolitan business centre, the past has grown wings.

Heitor has always been shy, and when his latest girlfriend dumps him, he rents a run-down hut on the outskirts of Luanda to heal his broken heart. Listening to a particular radio programme, Heitor soon becomes addicted to the charming voice of its presenter Marisa. Through fate, they meet and fall in love. But Marisa is married… Featuring quirky and loveable characters, The Shy One and the Women (“O tímido e as mulheres “) is not only a love story but also an entertaining portrait of today’s Luanda.

Set in the heart of Africa at the beginning of the 17^th century, Pepetela’s novel In the South. The Sombreiro (“À Sul. O Sombreiro”) is full of adventure, political intrigues and magical elements. While the ruthless governor Cerveira founds the town of Benguela, the black native Carlos Rocha flees to the Savannah and stays with one of Africa’s fiercest warrior tribes to avoid a terrible fate.

The Highlands and the Steppes (“O Planalto e a Estepe “) tells a true story of great passion and suffering, scarred by a love nourished by hope and waiting. When Júlio is sent from Angola to Portugal to study medicine, he gets involved in clandestine communist cells. In Moscow, he falls in love with the Mongolian girl Sarangerel. But politics and tradition conspire against them, and Sarangerel is taken back to Mongolia. Will they ever meet again?

After this successful foray into crime fiction, Pepetela returns with the ambitious and powerful novel The Predators (“Os predadores”) that attempts to get to the heart of Angola’s tragic recent history. The novel ostensibly revolves around the character of Vladimiro Caposso, an unscrupulous and opportunistic businessman, charting his rise and fall over the last thirty years. Going back to the last days of Portuguese colonial rule, we find Caposso aged 18, working in a colonist’s grocer’s store.  When the Portuguese leave, he takes over the store and begins his rise to wealth and power first through the heady days of the transition to independence, then becoming a corrupt bureaucrat as Angola joins the Soviet bloc, and onwards as an entrepreneur into the unrestrained capitalism and social upheaval of the 1990s, the civil war ever simmering in the background. The action stretches from tribal herdsmen’s villages seemingly untouched by civilisation, through Luanda’s decaying urban sprawl, to life on campus in the United States for an Angolan exchange student. Caposso is the link that binds these disparate worlds together, his actions impacting on the lives of every one of the characters.

Following the strongly-drawn characters from the shanty towns to the mansions of the nouveau-riche with an engrossing plot, passionately written and keen to explain, there is no more readable introduction to Angola and its recent past.

In Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent (“Jaime Bunda, agente secreto”), the author has chosen the fat, unlucky trainee at Luanda’s secret police, as the protagonist of a crime story set in Luanda, where it is easier to find a Kalashnikov than an honest official. Jaime Bunda becomes a credible guide on an anything but touristy trail through the city of Luanda. He appears again in the following novel, Jaime Bunda and the Death of the American (“Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano”). Now he has to clear up the murder of an American engineer. Pepetela pokes fun at the Americans for their seemingly pathological anxiety of terror attacks as well as mocking the antiamericanism of the Angolans. The tensions within this country, which lives in constant political insecurity since its independence, are continuously present in Pepetela’s work.

Lisbon 1961. Aware that the secret police are watching them, four young Angolans discuss their plans for a utopian homeland free from Portuguese rule. When war breaks out, they flee to France and must decide whether they will return home to join the fight. Two remain in exile and two return to Angola to become guerilla fighters, barely escaping capture over the course of the brutal fourteen-year war. Reunited in the capital of Luanda, the old friends face independence with their confidence shaken and struggle to build a new society free of the corruption and violence of colonial rule. The Utopian Generation (»Geração da Utopia«) is widely considered in the Portuguese-speaking world an essential novel of African decolonization.

Pepetela’s career as a writer started during the war for independence, when he wrote his first novel, Mayombe, published in 1980, in which he describes the conflicts in Angola’s fight for liberation. His novels are mainly set against the backdrop of important historical events during almost a century of Angolan history. An essential theme of his work is the greatness and strength of past cultures still existing in modern Angola.

The ironical, merciless portrait of the country’s capital Luanda in Kianda’s Desire (“O desejo de Kianda”) shows a post-colonial Angola worn down and devastated by four decades of colonial and civil war.

Our Musseque (“Nosso musseque”) is a captivating tale of growing up in one of the vibrant shanty towns, the musseques, of Luanda during the 1940s and 1950s. Weaving back and forwards through his half-remembered childhood, the narrator draws us into a close-knit world of labourers, shopkeepers, drunks, prostitutes and determined women battling to bring up their families, as Angola hurtles towards the beginning of its armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Meanwhile the children laugh, play, squabble and fight, puzzle at racial taunts and move rapidly through adolescence towards sexual awakening and a greater awareness of political realities around them. José Luandino Vieira gives each their own voice. Nosso musseque is an impressive and beautifully rendered portrait of a society on its way toward a self-determined future.