Antonio Callado’s novel Quarup made him a name beyond Brazil. The title refers to the indigenous Brazilian festival of burning and rebirth of the ancestors. Father Nando, a missionary, is sent to convert the Indios in the Xingú reservation. Galvanized by friends’ accounts, he joins the struggle for liberation of the rural population living in abject poverty in the north-east of Brazil.

When Quarup was published in 1967, Brazil had been under a military dictatorship, with politically active priests suffering particularly harsh persecution. Callado’s novel gained special significance in this socical setting and is still one of the most important novels in Brazilian contemporary literature to this day.

Sempreviva is one of Callado’s most significant works. The Brazilian Quinho intends to avenge the murder of his lover, the mulatto girl Lucinda, who was abducted by the military regime, and then tortured and killed on a fazenda.

In A expedição Montaigne (“The Montaigne Expedition”), a journalist wants to free the native population from the white man. As an admirer of French culture, he takes along a bust of Montaigne. But the plan comes to a disastrous end.

In the heart of Dili, overlooking a sea that holds more silence than waves, stands the Hotel Timor. The building is more than just a place of passage: it is a witness to a history that has stood the test of time. Between Lisbon and Timor, between departure and impossible return, this novel inhabits the frontier of exile. The characters move like lost travellers, strangers in their own land, beings who seek redemption in memory and stumble upon the still-open wound of history. Interrupted loves, fragmented destinies, letters never sent, voices that return at dawn: everything converges in the rarefied atmosphere of the hotel, a metaphor for a country and an identity suspended between ruin and hope.

With dense, melodic and sometimes cruel writing, the author constructs a narrative that is both intimate and collective. Hotel Timor speaks of pain and resistance, of oblivion and memory, of the weight of absences and the obstinacy to continue living, even when everything around threatens to disappear. To read this book is to enter a space where literature becomes a dwelling place of shadows, but also of unexpected clarity — a place where words resist, as a last refuge against loss.

Can the most enchanting of sounds narrate disenchantment? With his novel The Pumpkin Planter (Sonata for a Fog) (“O Plantador de Abóboras (Sonata para uma Neblina)”), Luís Cardoso seems to prove that the intersecting voices of the narratives are like a Swiss army knife, offering in any given moment the exact tool to open whatever is hidden in a painting, in a character’s name, in a figure or historical moment.
A woman waits and paints and therefore thinks. Through her are passing episodes, possibilities, failures, memories, ancestors, animals, countries, men, history. And what remains with her of all this? The woman does not simply collect, but seeks the underlying construction of these gestures. Of a house, for example. And of love, after all and always the greatest of stories. To say what happens in these pages risks reducing the very humanity that the author makes happen. At each step we are moved, we laugh and we reflect.
Timor, that mythical setting, will never be the same again after this journey where the concrete and the mythical, Sancho Panza and Chibanga, the roses and the coffee, the horse and the goose, the colonial empire and the Orient are called on stage to narrate the ways of making the world. Can we be the masters of our seeds? Can the world be a pumpkin?

“I have just arrived on the island where I lived during my childhood, looking for someone.”
The return to Ataúro, land of childhood, “land of never”, is the beginning of this new voyage in reverse by Luís Cardoso; a fast, poetic and emotional novel that traverses the childhood and formative years of the narrator, the diaspora, the struggles, the disillusions, the betrayals, the losses, and the return, meanwhile encountering a host of extraordinary characters. A journey that, of course, runs alongside the history of East Timor, with the fantasy and irony that have always marked the author’s voice and make us sigh for those mysterious lands of terrifying beauty.

The writer Lucas in The Last Death of Colonel Santiago (“A Última Morte do Coronel Santiago”), left the island a long time ago and lives in Portugal. However, when he travels to his country, he is caught up by the past, since the crimes committed by his ancestors towards the Timorensians have not yet been avenged. Present and past are closely intertwined in this novel, which deals with love, death and the search for the roots of human beings.

Cardoso’s second novel Owl Eyes – Cat Eyes (“Olhos de Coruja – Olhos de Gato Bravo”) is mainly set in the period of Portuguese colonisation, and highlights the explosive consequences which the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal had for the small, far-away colony. The novel is imbued with the myths and fables of Timor, to which Luis Cardoso has lent poetic expression.

In 1999, after 24 years of annexation by Indonesia, East Timor opted for independence. Prior to that, until 1975, the country was a Portuguese colony.

Crossing (“Crónica de uma Travessia”) reads like a colonial bildungsroman, but is in fact an autobiographical memoir of childhood and growing up in Timor, and subsequent exile in Lisbon. This particular work sheds light on a little known country over an important, nation-forming period of its history and  it portrays a territory that, whatever the weaknesses of the colonial system, was plugged into a Portuguese-speaking cultural world at the time of the events of 1975: from Salazar’s deportees who ended up in Timor, to soldiers from Mozambique and missionaries trained in Macau, to Chinese traders and returning Timorese students from Portugal, all make their appearance or are alluded to in this memory of a land under hostile occupation.

“Perhaps it would have been better to start by talking about the decision to use myself as a character: given that, in a newspaper column, the author is expected to be more openly present, this would be the place where I would try not to run away from myself. I know it was risky: I’ve lived extraordinary stories, I’ve been involved in terrible situations, I too would go mad if I wanted to. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to venture into myself. That’s why the autobiography is unauthorised. I would write my biography by default. The illicit act unmasked in the unauthorised one concerned me alone. I never thought it could be any other way.
Of course, in talking about myself, I would also be talking about those who are or have been with me, those who are or have passed by me. I’m not alone, I’ve never been alone, I don’t know how to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. The others would be safe in my columns, I would be the only one in danger: shattering myself in my memory. I don’t know how to write about what I don’t love. To write is to discover, to know. And to know, if not to love, is at least to be willing to love. To be willing to love ignoble things, sometimes. Which is also frightening. Those I don’t love will never have a place in what I write. What I write is illuminated by those I love, they are the ones who write what I write. Or to put it another way, I am the ones I love, they are the ones who write me.”
– D.M.C

This book is the sequel of the author’s much-celebrated columns published in Visão magazine.

Unauthorised Autobiography (“Autobiografia não Autorizada”), which brings together her much-celebrated literary columns published in the magazine Visão, is of unparalleled intimacy in the author’s work: personal, autobiographical, transparent, and so purified that they become universal, Dulce Maria Cardoso’s columns make room for each of us. Like an armchair that is “moulded, day after day, by the weight of a body, becoming its nest”.
“An autobiography is an impossible mission. I ought to write a rigorous text, but I am always a character of my own self, even if I narrate everything in the first person and call myself Dulce, as if I were not inventing myself. To write is to think slowly. Slowness leavens or germinates as much as it withers or rots. And then there is the other side: you, the ones who are there. As a reader of fiction I inevitably seek the author in his text. What truth does the author hide in the lie he tells? An autobiography works somewhat the other way round: what lie does the author hide in the truth he reveals?”

Eliete is a normal woman in her early forties. There is hardly anything extraordinary about her life, and yet she enthrals us with her desire to live, and to understand people and things.

Her daughters are mostly on the internet and abroad; her husband is easier to meet on Facebook rather than at home. Who cares if Eliete, who feels strongly that her youth is gone, allows herself some escapades on a dating site? She would like to reignite her relationship with her husband, but he doesn’t seem interested. Eliete stays cool and doesn’t despair. Then suddenly she finds someone and something different – an inkling of love? Does Duarte love her like a hero in one of the photo-comic teenage magazines of her childhood? And what on earth does it mean when her dementia-suffering grandmother says that Portugal’s dictator is part of her family story?

Is normal life an everyday drama? It probably is, but still you can laugh at most of it. Written in precise language, Cardoso creates a multifaceted character of great strength. Ironic, but by no means distanced, Eliete – A Normal Life (“Eliete – A vida normal”) reflects on an apparently ordinary life against the background of a three-generation story of the 20th and 21st century in Portugal, in Europe.

The Return (“O retorno”) tells the captivating story of fifteen-year-old Rui, whose family, like a hundred thousand other whites, has to leave Angola after independence from Portugal is declared. For the first time, Rui touches the ground of the “metropolis”, as his mother has always referred to Lisbon in a tone of longing. In this unexpectedly run-down city, Rui not only struggles with the uncertain fate of his father, who stayed behind, but also with finding his place in hostile surroundings. In a personal and clear way, Cardoso describes a crucial moment in Portugal’s history and tells a story that could have happened to so many returners elsewhere in the world. The novel has been voted as number 4 of the 10 favourite books 2014 of the French financial newspaper Les Échos.

Her second novel, Violeta among the Stars (“Os Meus Sentimentos”), revolves around Violeta, a middle-aged woman who earns her living as a sales representative for hair removal products. At the very beginning of the novel Violeta suffers a heavy car crash. Until the end the reader can’t be sure whether she has survived or not. Her subconscience, however, lives on and scenes of the past start moving before her inner eye, overlapping each other and getting mixed up with events just before the accident. Her French-speaking mother, who has a beauty ideal that Violeta could never live up to with her unshapely big body, reappears, as well as her father, who was denounced by his illegitimate son during the Carnation revolution. Violeta also remembers the difficult discussions she had with her daughter Dora, who was idolized and spoilt by her grandparents for being so different from her mother. Having been freed from the burden of her own existence, Violeta, who was often called a scarecrow by people on the street due to her conspicuous presentation, now takes a sharp look behind the façade of her fellow human beings.

Violeta among the Stars captivates the reader by the exceptional narrative talent of Dulce Maria Cardoso and her poetic and precise language. With empathy rather than sentimentality she creates lively characters and draws an unsparing portrait of today’s society.

Field of Blood (“Campo de sangue”) is Cardoso’s first novel, for which she received the Grande Prémio Acontece. Four women who have nothing to say to one another wait nervously in the dim light of an inhospitable room. Four women, all of whom have a special relationship with a man who just committed a murder: his mother, his landlady, his ex-wife and a young girl who is expecting a child from him. The events unfurl in the form of flash-backs in which the relationships of the individual women to each other are highlighted. The narrative returns repeatedly to the point of departure. Except for Eva, the murderer’s ex-wife, no one in this unusual and profound novel has a name. The man and Eva, who both come from poor families, separated six years ago. Although Eva married a rich man immediately afterwards, they continue to meet as lovers. As his wife, Eva used to work to keep them both, and now as his ex-wife she continues to finance him with her new husband’s money B out of exaggerated, almost demented love, it is said. One day the man murders a woman he does not know by stabbing her several times in the chest, explaining afterwards that she was his girlfriend and that he wanted her heart. Beauty and loneliness can cause a person to lose their mind.

In an objective and yet poetic language, Dulce Maria Cardoso describes a world of hopelessness and repressed feelings in which everything is a deceptive game in the search for a truth that does not exist.

Membrane (“Membrana”) is a highly original novel that puts a spectacular twist on the tradition of speculative fiction from Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. LeGuin, Donna Haraway and Ted Chiang. Narrated by a complex artificial intelligence in the year 2100, it tells the secret history of the 21st century: how algorithms gradually took power and secretly built a monumental museum in the Amazon jungle to tell the story of how they became an empire. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”, said Walter Benjamin. The story we are reading, which takes the form of the catalogue of The 21st Century Museum, under which name the novel won the Barbastro Prize for Literature 2021, is no exception. To write it, Jorge Carrión – one of Spain’s most acclaimed and widely translated writers, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times – has invented a neo-language, somewhere between narrative, poetry and essay, which imagines how the artificial intelligences of the future will write. An experimental and philosophical novel that reads like a thriller. A great reflection on the tumultuous relationship between technology and humanity.

Winner of the prestigious Ciudad de Barbastro Prize, worth 15,000 euros.

Did the 21st century begin with the fall of the Twin Towers in New York or with the entry of a virus into a man’s body in Wuhan? Is SARS-CoV-2 the first cyborg pathogen? Are Netflix, Zoom and Amazon multinational pandemics? How can one represent the transformation of science fiction into everyday reality? The Viral (“Lo viral”) is, at the same time, a meticulous reconstruction of the first months of the coronavirus from personal experience, a fragmentary essay on digital virality, the memory of a quarantined library, an experiment in cultural criticism and a false but sincere diary that manages to keep the reader in permanent brain activity and throws up a series of essential questions about the future that awaits us.

Picking up where Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon (“Contra Amazon”) explores the impact of new technologies on bookshops and libraries. Collecting Jorge Carrión’s essays on these vital cultural spaces, as well as interviews with the writers who love them. Jorge Carrión travels to the innovative libraries and bookstores of Seoul; in Naples and Capri he researches the history of the mythical house of Curzio Malaparte; he interviews booksellers and writers; he talks about books and cities with Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara and Han Kang; he interprets the libraries of Don Quixote and Captain Nemo, and pays homage to some of the world‘s most fascinating bookstores and libraries. Against Amazon is in equal parts a history of books and bookshops, a reader’s autobiography, a travelogue, a love letter – and, urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive pressures of modern-day capitalism.

In his new book Barcelona: Book of Passageways (“Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes”), Jorge Carrión invites us to stroll through the streets of Barcelona and especially its passageways, those elements of urban life that bring people together and contain hidden stories. The author wanders around the city, speaks with passers-by and the inhabitants of the passagaways. He rediscovers historical characters and stories that have contributed to the development of the city. Carrión tells us about Barcelona, but in reality he is talking about urban spaces all around the world, and the book is also in some ways a tribute to Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”.

In The Deceased (“Los difuntos”), Jorge Carrión tells the prequel to The Dead (“Los muertos”), set in a fictional 19th century New York City. In this society where technological progress reigns, “new ones” are enslaved in order to ensure the working of the steam machines. With time, they will climb the social ladder and become the “old ones”. In this scenario the philosophical ideals of Dionysos and Apollo materialize in the main character, who will battle against the decadence of progress and the oppression it generates. Jorge Carrión brilliantly narrates this tale about the search for identity and purpose set in a fictional world that is in many ways much like ours – from the alienation of the human being in a technological world, to the high price the “new ones” are willing to pay for the American dream.

Jorge Carrión’s book Bookshops (“Librerías”) is a survey of the history of bookstores all over the world, their relationships with writers and how they became the center pieces of culture and political resistance, making a trip through the history of the book trade from Ancient Rome to the 21st century. Nostalgic yet demystifying, this extraordinary book is the result of many readings, researches and visits to bookstores on the five continents, veering between cultural critique and travel chronicle. Librerías has come second in the prestigious Anagrama Award for Essays.

In his cleverly construed novel The Footprints (“Las huellas”), the author brings a number of essential topics like identity and human relationships together with moments in time and space, keeping the reader glued to the page. Reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Las huellas features a suggestive plot and vivid characters that make us question the future of our planet.

A arte de morrer longe (“The Art of Dying Far Away”) is an entertaining satire about a series of apparently unimportant causalities which turn the lives of a middle-class Lisbon couple upside down. Arnaldo and Bárbara have been happily married when one day Bárbara believes she may be in love with her employer’s son. Arnaldo responds by saying that he too is having an affair, although this is not true. On dividing their possessions, they find that neither wants to keep the turtle they once bought together. With fluid language and sharp irony, Mário de Carvalho cleverly portrays society. This amusing novel full of slapstick elements will have the reader laughing out loud or grinning silently to himself.

The protagonists in Carvalho’s novel Mulher em Branco (“Women in White”), Paulo and Laura, have split up. Laura has thrown Paulo out after finding out that he was cheating on her. Their love story had begun many years previously when they fell in love against their parents’ will. But since their child was born, their love seems to have evaporated, and all that keeps them together is dull everyday life. The separation is very painful for them both, because Laura can’t accept that their love is over. She refuses to leave Paulo alone, causing scenes and even attacking him when he comes to their old home to collect a few possessions.

But then a tragic event changes everything: out with his young son one Saturday morning, Paolo receives a phone call and takes his eyes off Afonso for a fateful moment. When he turns around to look for him, Afonso has disappeared without a trace. At his wits’ end, Paulo calls Laura and the police. Laura suffers a shock and loses her memory – this way, she doesn’t have to deal with the loss of her child; she doesn’t even know she had a child and has been through a divorce. The police launch an investigation. Various members of both Laura’s and Paulo’s families are suspected, but the police can’t prove anything.

At the end of the novel, Paolo and Laura meet up again. Laura has now regained her memory, and although the couple don’t get back together they do try to cope with the loss of their child together.

In Mulher em branco, all the characters are unhappy and deserted, enveloped by a kind of Portuguese saudade. Only gradually do the various parts of the jigsaw come together to form a picture, revealing a dense network of interwoven fates.

In his novel Canário (“Canary”) twenty-four-year-old Geraldo pushed his mother’s young lover out of the window during an argument and killed him. He has three years of his five-year prison sentence behind him, and he could be released for good behaviour. He just needs someone to apply for parole for him. Against all expectations, a lawyer really is interested in his case: the friend of the respected writer Alexandre, who proves to be Geraldo’s illegitimate father. Amélia, the young man’s mother, once had a brief affair with Alexandre. She never got back in contact with the author so as to protect his reputation. But now that she is suffering from cancer, she wants to reveal the identity of Geraldo’s father in the hope that he will take care of his son after her death.

The news of the existence of an illegitimate son shatters the fragile harmony in Alexandre’s family. His wife Maria Antónia feels it questions their marriage of over forty years, yet she does not have the strength to leave her husband. The author, whose only interests are himself and above all his own fame, sees the encounter with his unknown son as a way out of his increasingly pressing writer’s block. In his new and last book, he wants to tell the story of a writer whose illegitimate son is in jail. To familiarise himself with this material he has to meet Geraldo, sound him out, suck the blood of his real life.

In the end the young man who struggles desperately to find words, and the famous author who crystallises every experience into sentences on paper, finally do come together in a fatal embrace. After the conclusion of the novel, Geraldo – a canary transformed into a bird of prey, a beast let out of its cage – throws himself on his father from behind as he stands on a cliff, the two of them plunging to their death.

The text is a close-knit mesh of relationships, almost demanding a second reading to get to the bottom of it. One can’t help going back to the beginning and starting over again. And what better can one say about a book?

Elsa never imagined that many years after leaving high school, she would receive a box containing the diary of Violeta Quirós, her former teacher of National Spirit Education. They barely knew each other, so why then become the recipient of her memoirs? What begins as a strange surprise soon turns into an unexpected journey: in these pages lie family secrets, the wounds of a divided Spain and revelations that seem to speak as much about Violeta as about Elsa herself. As she grapples with the conflicts she has been carrying for years, Elsa discovers disturbing parallels with her teacher’s life. Coincidences? Fate? Or a message that arrives just when she needs it most?
The Geometry of Memory (“La geometría de la memoria”) is a story about the traces of the past, the invisible ties that bind us together and the courage to face one’s own truth.

In All the Shipwrecks (“Todos los naufragios”), Canor has just returned to Nozaleda, his fictitious hometown in Asturias, Spain, in the 1920s. After making his fortune in Cuba he is now at least as rich as the Santaclaras, an old landowning family for whom his family had worked for generations. Canor’s son Onel and the Santaclara’s son Gregorio are kids when they meet. They are soon united by a deep friendship that will last a lifetime, despite all the contrasts between them: Onel has dark skin and is rejected by the town priest Clemenciano, who sees him as the incarnation of evil; Gregorio on the contrary has been raised in a traditional, conservative family, which owns much of the town of Nozaleda, a feudal village with the priest at its helm. When Flora, the new teacher, arrives from Madrid, the women of the village glimpse the possibility of a new world: they learn to read and write, and hear new words such as “emancipation” or “right to vote”. Flora marries Canor and takes care of his children, while Onel’s biological mother, a Cuban dancer who had left Canor seeking a better future in the USA, spends her whole life looking for her son. At the same time, Flora’s brother Emilio, an anarchist of the soul, brings politics to Nozaleda. Neither Flora and Canor, nor Onel and Gregorio can escape it. Aligning themselves with the anarchist movement, they are confronted with repression, including by Clemenciano, representative of the Catholic Church and enemy of any kind of change, who made a pact with the falangists. Political turbulences in dark times sow betrayal, further exile and even death, but cannot break the friendship between Onel and Gregorio.

Towards the end of her life Valeria, an old lady from a good family, finally wants to find the courage to open a letter which her sister Gadea, who passed away eighteen years ago, has left her. Valeria embarks on a journey into her past, where a dark secret lurks and torments her with nightmares. From early childhood she has envied her younger sister, who was their father’s favourite and who now has two children of her own, thereby loading herself with guilt. Now she consults the psychologist Laia who has just moved into an apartment in Gijón, together with her girlfriend Emma. Valeria’s stories open to Laia a new and fascinating world, and also to Feli, who works in the retirement home where Valeria lives and secretly rummages through her papers. The Night When It Didn’t Stop Raining  (“La noche que no paró de llover”) goes back to the time before the civil war and the beginnings of the Franco dictatorship, yet Castañón does not lay out a historical panorama. Rather, she is interested in the individual, and so she is able to draw incredibly vibrant characters, showing their internal contradictions and exploring the relationships between them. She does so with great empathy, stylistic diversity and a long epic breath – the gifts of a born storyteller.

Aida, a journalist in her forties, lives obsessed with finding the remains of her grandfather, who was killed during the Spanish civil war. While undertaking this search, she encounters Bruno, an actor with an enveloping character with whom she has a disturbing romance. Leaving Things in Their Day (“Dejar las cosas en sus días”) is a novel of characters and interwoven stories in the best tradition of family sagas.

He Who Is Thirsty (“El que tiene sed”) is a beautiful and painful novel that tells of a world bordering on madness: alcoholism, its hell and a breathtaking metaphysical adventure. How to satisfy the impossible, how to fight against the inexhaustible thirst that does not recognize origin, how to realize that life itself is the realization that happiness does not exist. These are the questions that torture Esteban Espósito, an alcoholic writer, in his lucid and drunken perception of reality. With lyricism and crudeness, the author manages to investigate the extremes of human degradation, the daily guilt, the humiliation and the outbursts of fate that push to the very limits of authenticity. The masterly prose of Abelardo Castillo transforms the experience into a true work of art where language acquires all the splendour of the shudder.

Esteban Espósito, a young writer with an alcohol problem and a penchant for theological inquiry, arrives in the city of Córdoba for a literary symposium he could not care less about. The city is as mythical as it is real, a place where time seems to behave in an inexplicable way, and where Esteban will spend thirty-six decisive hours of his life. October 1962. The imminence of war due to the missile crisis. This is the backdrop to Chronicle of an Initiate (“Crónica de un iniciado”). The love of Esteban and Graciela, the unforgettable figure of Santiago, the Rabelesian apparitions of Father Cherubini and the demonic professor Urba, the traps of benzedrine and sex, the mystery of a city founded cabalistically, make up an exciting surface plot under which lies the real one: Esposito’s journey of initiation that will connect him with other existential searches, with delirium, with the problem of time, with the meaning of life and death, recreating Faust’s pact with the devil for the sake of our arts.

Castillo manages the threads of uncertainty and gives us a monumental novel whose centre is an encrypted knowledge: “there is a secret order, the devil told me”, the protagonist of this chronicle confesses. Is Esteban going to sign the Pact? Does he even have a choice? In the tradition of Goethe and Thomas Mann, of Arlt and Marechal, the metaphysical depth and perfect architecture of “Crónica de un iniciado” simply dazzle.

The Gospel According to Van Hutten (“El Evangelio según Van Hutten”) is a bold and captivating revisionist reconstruction of the origins of the Christian era: conspiracies, detective intrigue and fantastical erudition.

How far are the gospels riddled with false claims, and how much important information about the Dead Sea scrolls has been censored? Were the Essenes a secret community split off from Orthodox Judaism, as well as the forerunners of Christianity and educators of Jesus Christ? Was Christ a mere saboteur of doctrines, rather than the son of God? During a vacation in La Cumbrecita, a middle-aged history professor discovers that the controversial archaeologist Estanislao Van Hutten, presumed dead, lives hidden from his detractors with a secret that could shake the most deeply rooted religious beliefs. The revelations made to the historian about the Holy Scriptures are based on the discovery of the ancient Dead Sea scrolls that call into question the official version of the figure of the Messiah.

Abelardo Castillo offers the reader the adventure of decoding a large palimpsest, while enjoying the escalating intrigue. An intelligent novel, original and solidly constructed upon the revelation of a truth: that to be does not need proof.

Chiaraviglio argues that There Is No Couple (“La Pareja No Existe”) instead there is a bond between two people that is built step by step.
When did being in love turn into a toxic fairy tale? Ending a relationship, or reviving the fire, means acknowledging love as energy emanated from a healthy conscience. Dr. Nilda Chiaraviglio provides tools and key thought to build connections through agreements that deal with sensitive topics such as sex, money, and family. Can you choose how to connect and fi nd pleasure with the person you love? According to the author, “Yes! you can— and it’s beautiful”.
There Is No Couple is the first book in Chiaraviglio’s trilogy on relationships.

After the huge success of Niketche, Chiziane has now written The Joyful Song of the Partridge (“O Alegre Canto da Perdiz“), her fifth novel. Niketche dealt with the phenomenon of polygamy – the heroine discovers that her husband has more wives and families – whereas with The Joyful Song of the Partridge, Chiziane sheds light on the role of African women in the colonisation process. At the heart of the novel is the beautiful Delfina, who leaves her poor black husband and marries an affluent white man. Her aim is to bear children with lighter skin, thereby making it possible for them to have a better life. She is racist in her dealings with her own children, for example giving her firstborn black children worse food than the younger mixed-race children, and in so doing destroys her family and spirals herself into despair. Only decades later does she find her children and grandchildren, and particularly her daughter Maria das Dores, whom she thought had disappeared for good.

The story takes place in the Northern province of Zambézia, and is told looking back from the present day. The action takes place thirty years previously, still during the colonial times. Social problems, however, are not just down to colonisation alone, but also caused by the patriarchal structure which is increasingly evoked in myths tradition-conscious population. Instead of arguing the purity of black or white, Chiziane postulates on the affirmation of society’s mixture culture and an active adoption of the Portuguese language. As in earlier books, this author guides her readers through a world of traditional values and paints the captivating portrait of a collapsing society. Without using the methods of magical realism, she mixes mythical with real events and thereby creates a powerful, outlandish and incomparable work of poetic literature.

In 2002, Chiziane published her fourth novel, Niketche (Niketche is the name of an erotic love dance). Rami has been married to Tony, a senior police officer, for twenty years and they have several children. Her nightmare begins when she discovers that she has been sharing her husband with other women and their families. She subsequently tries feverishly to get to know these women and in doing so experiences to her great pain what it means to come up against ancient habits and customs and the enormous gulf between North and South in her country.

What do monogamy and polygamy mean? Are they products of culture, institutionalisation, hypocrisy, indolence or convention, or is it a matter of a person’s nature, intellect or emotions whether he or she adopts the one or other lifestyle?

Like in her former novels, the author leads her readers adeptly through a world of traditional values, drawing an exciting, compelling and also a humorous portrait of a society in the process of change.