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.

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.

Confession and Guilt (“A Confissão e a Culpa”) brings to a close a trilogy of works that the author has now grouped under the collective title THE MINDELO TRILOGY. It recounts an event that took place in the city of Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente in the Cape Verde archipelago. This event, which shook the country, was the strange and unexpected murder of the famous Cape Verdean writer Miguel Lopes Macieira, the pride of the island, by his closest friend, Engineer Edmundo do Rosário, at the very moment of the well-attended launch of his latest book, eagerly awaited by all the people of Mindelo. From the first line of the first volume: “Everyone was taken by surprise, so no one tried to prevent the murder of the islands’ best-known and most widely translated writer, mere moments before the start of the launch of what turned out to be his final work.”

The author now offers us the opportunity to find the answer to the question: Why did Edmundo do Rosário murder his best friend just as he was preparing to be celebrated once again by the people of Mindelo? That is the subject of this third volume of the trilogy. The murderer now has the floor.

The Last Bellow (“O Último Mugido”) is the sequel to The Faithful Dead, which ended with the writer’s murder at the hands of his best friend. In this instalment, his wife, Mariza, returns from America to carry out the writer’s will, specifically his public cremation in a square in Mindelo.

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.

In 1551, King João III of Portugal gives Archduke Maximilian an unusual wedding present: an elephant named Solomon. On the long and arduous journey from Lisbon to Vienna across the Alps, Solomon and his mahout Subhro become inseparable friends.

With loving detail, Saramago describes this incredible journey with his usual pinch of irony, showing how friendship and solidarity make life worth living even in the most dire situations. Taking historical facts as his starting point, The Elephant´s Journey (“A viagem do elefante”) tells the stories of those who have not found their way into the history books, and he does so with his very characteristic eye, recognising the greatness in the details and the details in the greatness.

Enhanced by João Amaral’s beautiful illustrations, this graphic novel is a feast for the eyes and the soul, and a homage to the Nobel Laureate’s novel.

With her refreshing comments on younger women’s conflicts in the era of e-mails, text messages and Facebook, Ofelia is the new heroine of the comic strip. In nine small images per page she tells us a whole story: Be it lovesickness, self-esteem or the imponderable ways of life, Ofelia will surprise us and make us laugh with her very real existential dilemmas and her audacious vision of herself and the world around her.

In his latest book, Bicycles in September (“Bicicletas em Setembro”), Baptista-Bastos depicts the cantankerous and lonely Jesuina, an old lady who spent her life looking after children and never left the house. When he dives into the sea of his memories to reconstruct the time when he lived with her, the narrator, Francisco, remembers how he and his group of friends discovered desire. At the same time, he shows Jesuina’s mature sexuality and brings out an interesting sexual tension between the generations – a tension that is frowned upon by her neighbours, isolating her all the more in her separate world. The setting is the neighbourhood of Ajuda in Lisbon, in the 1950s. The social scope of the novel includes Jesuina herself, a strong personality with a vein of mysticism and eccentricity; the neighbours, conservative and rather trivial ladies; children and teenagers; gypsies and other marginalised characters. Bicicletas em Setembro is a poetic reflection on the loneliness of each character, and the implacable mechanisms of memory.

Speaking of Inside Your Absence (“No interior da tua ausência”) José Saramago stated: “A great novel. A magnificent novel.” The novel has won an award from the International Association of Literary Critics, and speaks of the inexorable passage of time – of the sadness of a man who does not accept ageing, who falls in love, who does not care about ridicule, shame or humiliation when he is consumed by jealousy. “This extraordinary book speaks of all of us,” wrote the essayist and academic Maria Alzira Seixo.

His first novel, May your Heart not be disturbed (“No se turbe vuestro corazón”), was recommended for publication by Julio Cortázar himself and talks about the innocence of childhood and the mercilessness of war. Five years later, with his book Shipwreck of the Stars (“El náufrago de las estrellas”), Eduardo Belgrano Rawson had already made a name for himself as one of Argentina’s most brilliant narrators. The novel was awarded the Premio del Club de los Trece. It is a story of tragedy as well as profound love. Belgano Rawson is one of the very few Latin American authors to be compared to great Anglo-Saxon literary figures such as Hemingway and Ondaatje.

Fuegia (Tierra del Fuego) was awarded the Critics’ Prize as best Argentine novel in 1992. Here the author gives an account of the last days of the people on Tierra del Fuego at the beginning of the 20th Century. After being raped, the native Camilena Kippa decides to leave the English Mission with her family. The danger-ous path to their destination, the country of seals, leads through the area of shepherds, the territory of the white intruders. With a language that is simulta-neously austere and poetic, the author depicts the apocalypse of this part of the world. In one of Argentina’s most important newspapers, La Nación, the novel was celebrated as Argentina’s most moving novel of the last decades.

Fuegia is going to be adopted as a documentary. Currently, the author is working on the screen-play.

After Secret News from America (“Noticias secretas de América”), where the author recorded the history of his continent in the way he would have liked to have been introduced to it, he published the novel Setembrada. Although set during the bitter war between the alliance of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against the small country of Paraguay from 1865 to 1870, one is compelled to follow the story, as if it were taking place at present. Belgrano uses short and precise sentences to tell a moving story of love and friendship in war.

In Rosa from Miami (“Rosa de Miami”), the reader is kidnapped to the Caribbean of the 1960s right up to the present, populated with fictional as well as real characters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ernest Hemingway. Belgrano Rawson once again mocks all official historiography and instead tells of people who, as victims or culprits or both simultaneously, were involved in these historic events, each in their own personal way.

Belgrano Rawson’s latest novel The Sermon of La Victoria (“El sermón de La Victoria”) tells the riveting tales of Nelson and Jorge’s doomed fates, based on two genuine cases. Nelson is held responsible for a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison while Jorge’s wife and newborn son disappear during the dictatorship, like so many others. Both become victims of a state that has not yet overcome all the shadows of that time.

In 1954 Bessa-Luís became famous with the novel The Sibyl (“A Sibila”) which draws a realistic portrait of the rural population of northern Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Considerable psychological astuteness and analytical acuity make this novel a masterpiece of Portuguese literature. In her novels the sexes are separated by traditional gulfs, though these are frequently traversed. The female figures act according to intuition and stand for preservation and permanence. By contrast, the men are interested in bringing about change and accelerating time. The author’s language and narrative technique are reminiscent of Camilo Castelo Branco, the great nineteenth century Portuguese writer. In addition to sensitively portraying characters, Agustina focuses mainly on social and political change in northern Portugal.

Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”) narrates the life of Ema Cardeano, the only daughter of a father who was widowed early. She seems to find happiness when she marries Carlos Paiva, a mediocre doctor from the countryside. Disenchantment with marriage comes quickly, the rites of patriarchal society suffocate her. The successive lovers who were supposed to restore her happiness push her into an increasingly anguished and empty life. Her transgressions are a fleeting consolation, loneliness a path she will forever walk, until the bitter end.
An exceptional rewriting of Madame Bovary and adapted as a feature film by Manoel de Oliveira, Bessa-Luís’ psychological insight is astonishing, the descriptions and the protagonist’s reflections on the female condition dazzling. It is that which is expected in so many books and discovered in so few; simply a masterpiece.

Several of her novels have been filmed by the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira: Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”), The Lands of Risk (“As terras do risco”) as well as Fanny Owen. Agustina Bessa-Luís has also written film scripts (Party) and theatre plays. Between 1986-87 she was editor of the newspaper O Primeiro de Janeiro (Porto). From 1990 to 1993 she directed the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon. Since the 1960s she has been a member of numerous national and international academies and writers’ associations. Her works have been translated into many languages and she has been awarded important literary prizes.

Bizzio immerses us in a fascinating literary experiment with an international fashion magazine, which he turns into the raw material for a reinvention of language, and using the cut-up. We Know What Happens at Night, Snail (»Sabemos lo que pasa por las noches, caracol«) is the result of a work that defies all kinds of conventions left and right. As well as a play with words, the work is a singular reflection on the nature of language, of meaning and its capacity to evoke emotions and sensations (in this case extremely strange ones). In short, „almost everything in these pages“ invites us to enter a unique universe, made of both conscious choices and chance, where creativity and imagination – both Bizzio‘s and the reader‘s – are the exclusive protagonists.

In A Beautiful Place (“Un lugar precioso”), two novellas (about the holiday of a couple who meet an unexpected acquaintance on the beach, and the unusual small-town nature of Martian abductions) are connected by the paranoid idea that approach and invasion function as synonyms. A beautiful place designates both the familiar space of the beach house and that of a parallel, simultaneous universe accessed by crossing the crystalline membrane of a bubble. But what strategy, however complex, can be employed to cope successfully with the surprises of fate, which test us in the uncomfortable presence of a person or the disturbing familiarity with a being from another planet? In Bizzio’s irreverent literature, the phenomenal pleasure of the written sentence can be followed by a crackle of splintered nerves, and the idyll by a hell of interstellar bureaucracy.

Mirages detach themselves from reality like the mercurial vapor of distance on a road. Ethereal. It is there and yet unreachable. When we think we have mastered it, what we believe to be real folds in on itself, or unfolds like a magician’s handkerchief.
Sergio Bizzio pulls back the curtain. Everything seems to be as it is. And yet… knock on the glass and some peculiar members of the human species reach extraordinary speeds; a doll comes to life and dies, or someone has to struggle with the power to make all their wishes come true…
In Bongo Fury, Bizzio reveals the richness of his art. Time accelerates exponentially; voices become inaudible; geographies shift and bodies twist in unusual acrobatics. Each story opens up to the unknown dimension of the times we live in.

Beyond the well-known stories of Juan Díaz de Solís, Pizarro, Magellan and Columbus, there are many others that were forgotten and lost; some distorted and falsified, and others, perhaps, that never had the chance to be told. Bizzio takes advantage of the gaps in history to give free rein to his imagination in a short, intense piece about the clash of civilisations.

The Lost (“Perdidos”) is a fast-paced novella, told in the first person through the diary or logbook entries of an explorer of the new world. A surprising and dynamic read with powerful and well-constructed episodes that weave together a succession of encounters and misfortunes, adventures with the indigenous people and nature in a jungle as dangerous as it is beautiful: the Amazon. Showing the fragility, helplessness, fear and sense of humour of these men who, despite their role in history (in today’s eyes destructive and criminal), were still fathers and sons with families on the other side of the ocean to whom they hoped to return.

-What are you doing disguised like that? Aren’t you warm?
-I’m not disguised, I’m from another planet.

Three Martians (“Tres marcianos”) are three brilliant tales with protagonists who come from the countryside, the city or other planets.

A gaucho assures his courtesan that there is a flying saucer parked on the top of a mountain and that, that very night, they are invited to meet its crew.

A being that can only be visited by appointment has shaken the life of the whole village; the neighbours are unable to comprehend what happens during these encounters.

After a space journey of more than two years, a couple meets again, but the embrace becomes unsettling: the other seems to be not exactly the same person they left behind.

Three close encounters of the first kind in the best Bizzio style: captivating from the first line, visual throughout and leaving the impression – or the doubt – that they really happened.

After their wedding party, Carlos and Irina go on a honeymoon: Ten Days in Re (“Diez días en Re”). She is happy; he is still a little drunk. They take a plane, get on a barge, and after many hours travelling they arrive at the beaches of Re. The landscape is perfect. And while looking at Irina smiling from the shore, a devastating certainty falls over Carlos: he does not love her. This thought stuns him in such a way that his arm is left stiff for days and he can’t move it. Carlos wanders like a soul in pain trying to make sense of his existence and thinking about how to proceed.

From what is initially perceived as a story of a separation, something else soon arises. The story mutates and twists, and drags us through the sand of its tropical paradise into the deepest bewilderment. On the scenography of a honeymoon, Bizzio sets a series of elements that stretch the limits of reality. Page by page the story becomes a new one, becoming thick and magnetized like the jungle that surrounds the characters. Once again Bizzio unfolds his sharply delicate prose, immersing us once more, with a disturbing naturalness, in a universe full of strangeness.

At the age of twelve, Irina lost her mother in a road accident. The next day she was sent to live with her father in Huel, a tiny village in the middle of the plains. For years she had not heard from him. She could only remember him as an office worker with an orderly life. Now he was a savage who looks after his physique: he eats raw eggs for breakfast, breaking them directly into his mouth, dressed in a sack and tie.

Life in Huel is monotonous and idle, until her father’s ex-wife returns with the intention of taking their house from them. They begin to build a new one nearby, but day after day they find the foundations destroyed. From then on, the plausible begins to get strange and twisted.

In My Life in Huel (“Mi vida en Huel”) Sergio Bizzio explores with delicate precision the social, aesthetic and amorous fantasies of an out-of-the-ordinary teenager in a world where the borders of the possible become increasingly diffuse. His mastery of the construction of atmosphere keeps us floating, flying over the land of an unusual and disturbing village.

Borgestein tells the apparently everyday story of a marriage crisis. Julia is an actress who only ever thinks of her career. When her husband is attacked by one of his patients he withdraws to a house in the mountains to think about his own life and their life together. With typical absurd narrative moments and unexpected twists and turns, the author has created a jewel of current Argentine writing.

As a star author grows tired of his success, he uses a plane crash to stage his death and starts a new life in the jungle. In his latest novel The Eaten Writer (“El escritor comido”), Bizzio takes the reader on an unusual and imaginative adventure while posing elementary questions on mankind today.

Written with the quiet humour and the fresh and concise style that characterise Bizzio’s books, Aiwa tells a tender and unusual love story in a world both bizarre and ordinary. When the teenagers Aiwa and Sony meet, it is love at first sight, but they have to hide their relationship. However, there are mysterious changes going on in Aiwa’s remote village, and soon a group of scientists disturbs their quiet life. What will they find?

In Bizzio’s novel Reality (“Realidad”), an Arabic terrorist commando hijacks an Argentine television channel in order to put pressure on the government to hand over a traitor. The Afghan head of the intruders is fascinated by the dynamics of the broadcasted reality show Big Brother and decides to use it to dismantle Western values. Indeed, the candidates accept any form of humiliation in order to become famous. As the hijackers are finally overwhelmed by the police, the fictional existence of the contestants ends and they return to real life – or is it the other way round?

It Was the Sky (“Era el cielo”) tells the story of a faltering relationship. Only a few days after making up with her, a man watches his wife being raped. He remains undiscovered and the two of them never utter a word on the matter. Caught up in the resulting dynamics, the protagonist sleepwalks towards the edge of a psychological abyss, only saved by his love for his son.

Rage (“Rabia”) is a fast-paced love story revealing the lives of the lower classes with psychological empathy and a good dose of black humour. After a heated argument with his foreman, the construction worker José María ends up strangling him and flees to the palatial villa where his girlfriend Rosa works as a maid. Hiding out in one of the attics, he watches the family. Then Rosa is raped…