The story begins with the tragic murder of a father and his daughter in a small town in modern-day Paraguay, a case assigned to two local policemen. It alternates with flashbacks that take us to the origins of the unmatched instrument, signed by the luthier Antonio Stradivari in 1737. From then on we see it pass from hand to hand across Europe until it falls into the grasp of a Nazi official who ends his days in Latin America. Each time and place is recreated with just the right blend of information and emotion, intimacy and atmosphere, historical figures interacting with fictional characters, all caught up in the centuries-long intrigue of which the instrument is the axis. The Mystery of the Last Stradivarius (“El misterio del último Stradivarius”) invites readers to embark on an exciting journey between the inherent laws of the detective genre and following a historical thread through the depths of the souls of those who have owned the instrument. The violin also functions as an amulet, a powerful object believed to protect its possessor from all harm. The sublime music it produces puts its listeners in direct contact with a supernatural dimension, highlighting the transcendence of art.

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.

“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.

In August 1914, a military incident in a village in northern Mozambique marked the beginning of the First World War on the African continent. In Mia Couto’s novel River Blindness (»A Cegueira do Rio«), this unexpected episode also triggers a series of mysterious events that culminate in the disappearance of writing in the world. Books, reports, documents, photographs and maps are wiped clean, and no one seems to be able to master the art of writing. The inhabitants of this village are called upon to restore order to the world by teaching Europeans the craft of writing and the arts of navigation.

The Infinite River (»O Rio Infinito«) is inspired by a traditional African story. One winter, the sun stopped rising and the world became dark and cold. Unable to hunt, unable to plant, the family believed that the end of the world had come. Kianda thought: ‘We need to tell our children stories.’ She left the house to look for them, but all the animals she met on the way were in a hurry and afraid. It was a giant tortoise – “God made me with one foot in the sand and one in the water” – who explained that no one but the spirits of the ocean have stories to tell, and took her to the bottom of the sea. In exchange for a sculpture by her husband, in which the queen and king of the deep sea discovered the charms of a kingdom they didn‘t know existed and with each new glance revealed new beauties, Kianda received a huge conch that told new stories every time she touched it to her ear. ‘Then the sun returned to the savannah. And gone forever were the days of hunger, darkness and cold.’

In Couto’s novel The Cartographer of Absences (“O Mapeador de Ausências”), Diogo Santiago is a prestigious and respected Mozambican poet and intellectual, professor at the University of Maputo, who returns for the first time in many years to his homeland, the city of Beira, on the eve of the cyclone that devastated it in 2019, in order to receive a tribute that his fellow citizens wish to offer him. This journey will be above all a return to his past, to his childhood and youth, when Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony.

A white boy, he is the son of a journalist and, moreover, poet father, and a completely practical and down-to-earth mother. From his father he remembers what he experienced with him: two trips to the place of terrible massacres committed by the colonial troops, his persecution and imprisonment by the PIDE, but above all, and throughout all this, his love for poetry. Diogo also remembers others who inhabited and enriched his and Mozambique’s past. Today he is living a love story that perhaps would have never become one. It all depends on the point of view.

The Cartographer of Absences develops an intrigue with both logical rigor and unexpected surprise, which makes this novel one of the author’s finest works.

In Mia Couto’s literary universe, in which a thing – an animal, for example – can be a person, the clouds that we see circling the sky with our eyes can, if considered with our imagination, exist underground. And if that’s the case, a Compendium for Unearthing Clouds (“Compêndio para Desenterrar Nuvens”) is of the greatest use to us.
In these twenty-two exercises in imagination, Mia Couto once again guides us to discover what lies in those things which we see with our eyes and those which our imagination gives us to see. And beware: the two images don’t always match.

The Invisible Elephant Hunter (“O Caçador de Elefantes Invisíveis”) collects under this title, which is also the name of one of the tales, the beautiful stories that the magazine Visão has been publishing every month. The style is sober and precise, the themes are various and diverse, the place from where the author sees the world and portrays it in this book is so wide that everything fits in. Between the story of the poor old man who receives a male nurse at home who is on Covid 19 screening duty, and, towards the end of the book, the conversation of the statues that come down from their pedestals – of their own voliton and not knocked over – to talk about the evils and mistakes of this world, between one and another of these stories, the reader encounters characters and scenes that are not going to leave his memory any time soon.

The Invisible Elephant Hunter is once again Mia Couto at his best.

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 isarrested 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 threewomen 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 familyare forced to face their best-kept secrets. Three delicious short novellas, full of humour and suspense, by two of the most popular and renowned fiction authors in Portuguese.

The Sands of the Emperor (“As Areias do Imperador”) is a fascinating trilogy about the last of southern Mozambique’s emperors, Ngungunyane. Mia Couto achieves the miracle of personalizing history. His language does not overwhelm and does not accuse. It astonishes, makes beauty and terror palpable and shows the abysmal strangeness inherent in such an unequal encounter of cultures. To show this strangeness is perhaps the first step in dealing with the Other.

With The Drinker of Horizons (“O Bebedor de Horizontes”) Mia Couto completes his trilogy The Sands of the Emperor (“As Areias do Imperador”). The book can be read as a self-contained novel, but also picks up exactly where the second volume of the trilogy ended. It continues the love story between the fifteen-year-old African woman Imani and the Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo. But the two will not meet again in this life: while Germano is left behind in Africa, Imani must accompany the imprisoned king of Gaza Ngungunyane and his seven women as an interpreter on the long voyage to Lisbon. For everyone but her, it will be a journey of no return. At the same time it is an odyssey through the Portuguese colonial empire at the turn of the year 1895/96. After showing the defeated “Barbarians” to the people and the international press in Lisbon, the king of Gaza is deported to the Azores. The women, among them Imani, who has to leave her new-born son Sanga with Germano’s mother, are brought to São Tomé. Imani finds a foothold above all with Dabondi, the youngest woman Ngungunyanes, who is a kind of seer and speaks in parables. Only after the fall of the monarchy in Portugal in 1911 does Imani return to her home village. On the return journey via Lisbon, she sees her son one last time.

Mia Couto achieves the miracle of personalizing history. His language does not overwhelm and does not accuse. It astonishes, makes beauty and terror palpable and shows the abysmal strangeness inherent in such an unequal encounter of cultures. To show this strangeness is perhaps the first step in dealing with the Other.

The Sword and the Spear (“A Espada e a Azagaia”), the second part of the trilogy, tells of the gradual demise of the kingdom of Gaza in Mozambique. After the attack on his quarters, the defeated sergeant Germano de Melo needs to be taken to hospital. The only one within reach is along the river Inhambane, so Imani goes on an arduous river journey with her father and brother. Meanwhile war rages around of them: the Portuguese occupiers and the king of Gaza’s warriors fight fierce battles with swords and spears, until the arrival of the machine gun ensures European supremacy. Germano wants to start a new life with the young Imani, but the Portuguese military have other plans for the injured soldier. Imani’s father also has different plans for his daughter: as one of Ngungunyane’s wives, she would be close enough to the tyrant to avenge the destruction of their village…

With poetic beauty, Mia Couto points to the futility of war and the boundaries of cultures that are apparently foreign to each other; boundaries which entire societies, but also families and lovers, conceive as simultaneously in decline, and yet still existent.

Woman of the Ashes (“Mulheres de Cinza”) is the first part of the trilogy. As punishment, the military sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the African village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portugueseconquest of Ngungunyane’s empire. There he encounters Imani, a 15-year-old girl who helps him with her language skills, and a people torn between two sides: while Imani‘s brother Mwanatu is fighting for the Portuguese crown, Dubula has chosen Ngungunyane. Slowly and with all their differences, Imani and Germano are drawn to each other. But in a country haunted by men and war, the only hope for a woman isto remain unnoticed, as if made of shadows and ashes. In his characteristically beautiful prose and alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Mia Couto gives us a vivid and unsettling account of a Mozambique at war at the end of the 19th century.

Confession of the Lioness (“A Confissão da Leoa”) tells the captivating story of the hunter Arcanjo, who is sent to an African village haunted by man-eating lions. There he slowly discovers the darkest secrets of its inhabitants, victims of brutality and inhuman traditions. Based on true facts and written in atmospheric language, Confession of the Lioness skilfully interweaves the enthralling stories of Arcanjo and his former lover Mariamar, constantly surprising the reader with unexpected twists and turns.

Have a look at an English extract on bookanista here!

The Tuner of Silences (“Jesusalém”) tells the fascinating story of a family whose lives were shaped by a deeply hidden tragedy. Mwanito and his father Silvestre live far removed from civilization when suddenly a woman appears to disturb their peaceful world, bringing them back to the city. There, Mwanito finally finds out how his mother died and what drove his father to insanity and into the wilderness. A powerful story about oblivion and how we deal with pain and guilt. The novel has been longlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2015.

In God’s Poison, Devil’s Relief (“Venenos de Deus, Remédios do Diabo”) three inhabitants of Vila Cacimba, a small village in Mozambique, are the protagonists: Bartolomeu Sozinho, a retired mechanic, his mulatto wife Munda, and Alfredo Suaecelência, the local authority a vain, corrupt administrator who has been friends with Bartolomeu since childhood and is in constant competition with him. Sidónio Rosa, a Portuguese doctor and aid worker with the task of dealing with an epidemic of meningitis in Vila Cacimba, is a witness to this conflict, which is loaded with sexual tension. Gradually, Sidónio comes to recognise the secrets and contradictions of the African village.

In reality, Sidónio Rosa came to the village in search of Deolinda, who he had met and fallen in love with in Portugal. She is Bartolomeu and Munda’s daughter, allegedly away on a trip. Again and again, Sidónio walks the path from the village’s only boarding house, to the couple’s home to visit Bartolomeu, who is suffering from severe diabetes. He becomes a kind of mediator between the old couple, who argue and fight although they still love each other. The couple tell him they are only in contact with their daughter by letter, but it later transpires that she died during the abortion of Suaecelência’s child. The administrator maintains she died of AIDS. The competition between Bartolomeu and the village head is to do with politics and also with love, as Bartolomeu has reason to suspect that his wife is also Suaecelência’s lover.

All the protagonists are caught up in a web of contradictions  even Sidónio, who claims to be a doctor but has not yet finished his medical degree and ought not to be treating patients. In African narrative tradition, the truth is just as important as its many variations. This book is a beautiful illustration of how people weave illusions around themselves so that they do not have to die.

The Sirene’s Other Foot (“O Outro Pé da Sereia”) is set in Mozambique in the year 2002. Mwadia Malunga and her husband, the shepherd Zero Madzero, discover a statue of the Virgin Mary. Mwadia is keen to bring the statue to Vila Longe, her place of birth, to keep it in a secure place. She is delighted to return to the village where she was born. The reader becomes acquainted with Mwadias mother, her stepfather, Lázaro the Curandeiro, the inhabitants of Vila Longe and finally, an Afro-American from the United States, allegedly on a quest for his lost African roots along with his Brazilian wife.

On pages of ever-shifting tone and colour, narratives of the present alternate with stories from the past. The statue of the Virgin Mary that Mwadia would find over four hundred years later, was transported on a ship from Goa to Mozambique in 1560, by the Jesuit missionary Dom Gonçalo da Silveira. It was his gift for the ruler of the mythical realm of Monomotapa and was to convert the people to Christianity. On the ship, which also carries slaves, he is accompanied by the young priest Manuel Antunes, who in the course of the crossing speaks out against the inhumane handling of the slaves. A lively picture emerges from colonial times up to the present day. And it would not be a book by Mia Couto if the author were not to capture the magical, mythical world of Mozambique with the all musicality of his language, linking the daily lives of his country’s people in past and present.

As in The Last Flight of the Flamingo (“O Último Voo do Flamingo”) or A River Called Time, a House Called Earth (“Um Rio Chamado Tempo, uma Casa Chamada Terra”) the author continues using his very own, uniquely melodic language to describe a world deeply marked by traditional forms yet caught up in the process of constant change in present-day Mozambique.

The Sleepwalking Land (“Terra Sonâmbula”), his first novel, was praised by the critics as one of the best novels in the Portuguese language to have appeared in recent years. In 2002 the Jury Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” selected The Sleepwalking Land among the top twelve. Its scenario is the battle for survival in the civil war in Mozambique. Similar to the magical realism of Latin America, in this novel and in Under the Frangipani Tree (“A Varanda do Frangipani”) Couto conjures up the nightmare of an omnipresent threat in a way which combines historical truth with individual dreams and living collective myths.

After his first volume of poems Couto published several short story collections and novels. He describes everyday life in Mozambique, a country whose people are among the world’s poorest and most maltreated after three decades of civil war. In the process of doing so, Couto integrates elements of his country’s oral tradition and his prose, which is of great musicality, succeeds in creating surreal-ghostly atmospheres out of a concrete link with reality.

‘One day, Grandfather peered out of the window and gazed at the mountains. He took a step back, his hands on his chest, as if he were gasping for breath. He pointed to the mountain tops, where a vast forest once stood. Now, only sand and stone remained. They had cut down every single tree.’
Seeds From Heaven (“Sementes do Céu”) is a timely tale, told with sensitivity and poetry, emerging from silence and the wait for the right moment to be born. A story that invites reflection on environmental conservation and dialogue between generations, penned by a duo of authors of recognised literary and artistic merit, who come together here for the first time in an illustrated book.

The Water and the Eagle (“A Água e a Águia”) is about a period of drought and how it is finally stopped by an old eagle. This old eagle starts eating the “i” in the name of her species, so “águia” (eagle) is transformed into “água” (water), and this way the water comes back. But only for a time: after the eagles have discovered how great it is to eat “i”s, they cannot stop, and the “rio” (river) stays without the “i” and dries out. Finally the oldest eagle decides to take a risk and despite everybody’s warnings, flies to a cliff and vomits all the “i”s she has yet eaten – and the water and the river come back!
This is a poetic and beautifully illustrated book about how ingenuity and courage can change the world.

Suddenly, in an African village, the rain does not fall, it is suspended, “amazed”, says a little boy from the village. The river is also drying up. Is it the fault of a factory nearby? Is it magic? What role do the old myths and legends play here? Can the cloud senders solve the problem? In The Amazed Rain (“A Chuva Pasmada”) Mia Couto leads us to a magical universe, to which the beautiful illustrations of Danuta Wojciechowska add a special touch.

Books are not meant to be written for children. We will barely be old enough to live in stories. Delighted, like the characters in this little book. In this way, in Little Word Kisses (“O Beijo da Palavrinha”), we will be able to be kissed by words. When Maria Poeirinha fell ill, Uncle Jaime Litorânio said that only the sea, which she had never seen, could cure her. The girl was too weak for the journey, but her brother Zeca Zonzo found a way to take her to see the sea. The magic power of words is the theme of this second book for children by Mia Couto, once again with magnificent illustrations by Danuta Wojciechowska.

Pintalgato, a kitten, is always being warned by his mother not to step beyond the borders of the day. But he, crazy to discover what hides under the shadow of the night, decides to venture out and ends up having an unusual encounter with the dark. When he returns to the light of day, he discovers that his coat, previously yellow with little spots, is now black as night, and he is terrified. With his mother’s help, however, he realizes that the fear of the dark, in fact, is the fear of the “dark ideas we have about the dark”.
In engaging prose and full of little poetic surprises, in The Kitten and the Dark (“O Gato e o Escuro”) Mia Couto elaborates a beautiful fable about the afflictions and enchantments of the unknown. In the words of the author: “Most of the fears we have suffered, as children and adults, have been fabricated to rob us of curiosity and to kill the desire to know what exists beyond the horizon.”

Desire, betrayal, malice and acidity permeate these explosive pages, with lively texts that provoke, disturb and make you laugh – just like in The Paediatrician, whose protagonist is the epitome of this scathing aspect of the writer‘s work. I Deny Everything. Sudden Fictions (“Nego tudo. Ficções súbitas”) is both an aesthetic delight and a sophisticated exercise in literature by an experienced author, who plays with form in very short stories and challenges common sense, questioning any Manichaeism.
In a handmade, numbered edition restricted to friends, first published in 2005, I Deny Everything was, unbeknown to anyone, the genesis of what would become Andrea del Fuego‘s new oeuvre two decades later. A sui generis book, which on its twentieth anniversary gets this new version, revised and reworked in detail by del Fuego: half of the stories have been replaced, others rewritten, but the rebellious essence remains.

Although medicine was a natural choice for Cecília, following in the footsteps of her father, she does not match the image one expects of a paediatrician. A doctor who is not at all maternal, with little affection for children and zero patience for their mothers and fathers.
And yet she has a successful practice as a sought-after neonatologist. Gradually, however, she ends up losing ground to a humanist paediatrician, who works with doulas, midwives and accompanies home births. Even the obstetrician with whom she has always worked seems to prefer the humanist.

Cecília undertakes an obsessive dive into the universe of humanised childbirth and alternative medicine, despite being practices she deeply despises. In parallel, she has a relationship with a married man, whose son she treats professionally during his birth. And this child will awaken unexpected feelings and attitudes in her.
With caustic humour and deft, succinct prose, Andrea del Fuego presents in The Paediatrician (“A Pediatra”) an insightful look at human behaviour and key contemporary issues, such as ethics, empathy and the limits that can be easily crossed by those in a position of power.

In her new novel The Miniatures (“As miniaturas”), Andrea del Fuego plunges the reader into a highly original world made up of dreams and reality. In a mysterious building full of corridors, people are working, under strict regulations, as interpreters of dreams. One day, as he leads a boy through his dreams using plastic miniatures, an interpreter realizes the boy is the son of one of his other clients. Although not allowed to work with members of the same family, the interpreter doesn’t report it and gets more and more involved in the lives of mother and son. Once again the author captivates her readers with a profound and entertaining novel.

The Malaquias (“Os Malaquias”) is an intriguing, intelligent story of family ties and fate in a world where magic lives alongside reality: When their parents die after being struck by lightning, Nico, Antônio and Júlia are separated. While each one tries to make it on their own, they continue to look for each other. Nico stays behind on a coffee plantation, while Antônio and Júlia are sent to an orphanage. In time, Antônio joins Nico and his family and Júlia becomes a successful dressmaker. Then Nico decides to leave for new shores, where he is sure he will see his sister again. A captivating family saga enhanced by a fresh literary tone that skillfully combines scientific conciseness with magical elements.

The world is living through an epidemic caused by an unknown virus, the Bola. The virus has already killed many people, including the grandfather of Vitor, a super-smart thirteen-year-old boy, skinny, with pimples on his face, who lives alienated from the world in front of his computer. Because of Samara, with whom he is in love, the young man discovers a game on the internet, the Skull, and ends up joining the mysterious Crystal Skull Society (“Sociedade da Caveira de Cristal”). To advance in the game, Vitor has to leave the computer on, the internet connected, and to fall asleep, because the game continues in his dreams. Thus, all the players have the same dream and live the same adventure. But Vitor, Samara, and the smart Jorjao (who owns an internet cafe) realize that something is wrong in this story and that together they can save the world from Bola.

Francesco Pasquale, a young coppersmith, leaves Sapri, on the Amalfi coast south of Naples, apparently fleeing from the monarchy and soldiers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It seems that he worked clandestinely for a secret society called Carbonari, which was an informal network of secret revolutionary societies active in Italy from about 1800 to 1831. Crossing the Mediterranean, he arrives in Barcelona and ends up in Bermeo in the Basque Country, a coastal town with a lot of character, the capital of Bizkaia before Bilbao, where he marries twice and becomes the father of several children. His neighbours only own three records, by Robert Schumann, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, three contemporary composers of Francesco’s times. As he lies on his deathbed, their sounds reach his ears through the window, while he remembers his childhood in Sapri.
Francesco‘s life is marked in first place by his condition as a migrant. Human beings usually have four souls: one in childhood, another in youth, another in maturity, and another in old age. But migrants, like Francesco, have a fifth soul, which lies between their place of birth and where they have, or where they have decided to live.
What sets About the Five Souls of Francesco Pasquale (“Sobre las cinco almas de Francesco Pasquale”) apart, is its structure, letting stories and tales fly together, making use of different storytelling techniques and narrators, forming a remarkable novel with a unique character.

In this novel, Elorriaga sends two almost eighty-year-old friends from the Basque Country, who could hardly be more dissimilar, on a final journey through Eastern Europe: Erroman, who tells us the story, is the epitome of calmness, Soro Barturen is eccentric, a millionaire and seriously ill. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – Barturen pursues his missing friend Pedro Iturria, with whom he had once studied engineering in London, like an obsessed man, with Erroman always at his side. Iturria had a passion for writing. Now the two friends follow the trail of his writings, published in the respective local languages, from Prague via Budapest and Warsaw to Moscow, for which the translators, especially Eszter Nagy, a Hungarian of Argentinean origin, are of special importance. In their conversations with Barturen, they have to answer all his questions.
Part of the novel is made up of some of the fascinating stories of the misunderstood genius Iturria. They deal with the deeper meaning of life in exceptional situations and depict dystopian visions of reality. The title story We Don’t Hang Anyone (“Iturria”/”Nosotros no ahorcamos a nadie”) stands out in particular: it culminates in the public hanging of five people and, with the simultaneous presence of past and future elements and an undefined controlling authority with terrifying rules, inevitably calls to mind Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”. The novel develops into an enjoyable literary scavenger hunt celebrating friendship and the art of storytelling.

Irene Arrias was born in Algorta, but she also looks straight ahead, without filters, at the rest of the world. That is why she is obsessed with all the forms of violence that, near or far, she is able to feel as her own: attacks, torture, murders, rapes, attacks, persecutions, massacres, executions, crimes and wars. Maps and Dogs (“Mapas y Perros”), originally published in 2014 in Basque, is Unai Elorriaga’s fifth novel. Winner of the Critics’ Prize in 2015 for its “pessimistic vision of the human condition” and finalist for the National Fiction Prize and the Basque Literature Prize, this book proposes a sort of panopticon of violence capable of tracing a route that leaves Algorta and crosses the world, through a network of dark events narrated with sordidness and precision that place us in front of the always convex mirrors of cruelty and fear.

The young protagonist Phineas is convinced that his vanished sister Sora has been abducted by the henchmen of the dictatorship terrorising their small town. Despite all the risks involved, he sets out to search for her. Phineas comes across reports and documentations of the permanent spying, torture and forced operations used to oppress every dissident in the surveillance state. Into this first part of his novel London Is Made of Card (“Londres es de cartón”) Elorriaga weaves a second strand, which reads like a typical English detective story. An elderly lady has been murdered and three men start the detective work of revealing the killer. The murderer they find is the schizophrenic Sora, who is put into a psychiatric ward. Although Phineas finds out what really happened to his sister in the end, he never loses hope of one day seeing her again. London Is Made of Card questions our familiar perception of reading. With virtuoso skill, the author uses dreams and imitation, confronting the reader with the horrors of a nameless dictatorship and the dubious nature of deductive investigations. Elorriaga is a master in showing us the gaps left behind by a desaparecido.

In Plants Don’t Drink Coffee (“Vredaman”) Unai Elorriaga tells the enchanting tales of a small Basque village. At first, we meet Tomas, whose childlike perspective forms one of four narrative strands. Since his father is in poor health, the boy spends the summer at his aunt’s house and goes hunting for insects with his older cousin. To catch the rare blue dragonfly is his highest ambition. As before with age, the author here skilfully encapsulates the child’s world with his imaginative and playful language. The most ambitious project of the summer, however, is impelled by Uncle Simón. As a rugby fan he has a tough stand in Spain, where only rarely a game is transmitted, let alone carried out. Yet with the help of 82-year old Piedad, who once lived in England and speaks the language, he manages to realize his wildest dream, to referee a game in Wales against Ireland. The game is a huge success for him, but he goes even further: Simón invites both teams back to his village. Here both players and spectators clamber over the walls of the nearby golf course where Simón and his friends have prepared a pitch. When the police eventually arrive on the sidelines, indecisive and late, the final whistle is blown and all disappear to conclude the evening on the beach. In scenes which sometimes border on the surreal, Unai Elorriaga presents us with a world in which dreams and desires still form part of everyday life. His protagonists are often simple human beings, who emanate a great kindness and who charm their environment and the reader alike.

A Tram to the Himalaya (“Un tranvía en SP”) tells of an unusual friendship between a young busker and a pair of elderly siblings. Critics were thrilled by the young author’s startlingly perceptive approach to thorny topics such as age, forgetfulness and death. Moreover, they rejoiced at his wilful style.

Julia dreams, dreams Ema (»Julia sueña, sueña Ema«) is a story about friendship, about the kind of light that friendship casts on life almost without us realising when the other is there, by our side, so much so that life is a dream, and dreams are full of wonderful coincidences. Two girls meet at school but shyness does not allow them to tell each other how much they like each other, yet what does not happen in class or at recess, happens on another plane… following the clues of these wonderful dreams.

In Dear Giant (“Querido Gigante”) Albertina is a giantess in love. In love with another giant named Vivaldo, who has one peculiarity: it’s hard for him to stay awake. He sleeps all the time. To communicate with him, Albertina writes letters, which she sends through her faithful handmaid, Lucrecia. Lucrecia goes and comes with the letters, from one castle to the other and she hands them over to Vivaldo’s faithful footman, Atilio. Albertina desperately hopes that her letters will capture the attention of her beloved as she shares with him information about the world outside. Until the kingdom falls into the peril of a foreign invasion. Albertina and Vivaldo are the only two giants, only they can defend the two gates to the kingdom and its inhabitants. But Vivaldo won’t wake up and Albertina has to handle the situation on her own. In the end she will manage to avoid a war without resorting to any form of violence, using only her creativity. She will also find, in an unexpected twist, a true love, wide awake! Set in medieval times, this children’s novel, through humor and a strong yet loveable female character, tells of unrequited love and the courage it takes to never give up. But, most of all, it tells of the importance of being awake and not missing out on the amazing opportunities that life has to offer us.

Do You Have a Book About Witches? And Other Stories (“¿Tiene un libro de brujas? Y otros cuentos”) includes three stories of the love between different creatures. Of the love that is possible between creatures who are different.

The first story, “Do You Have a Book About Witches?” (“¿Tiene un libro de brujas?”) tells the tale of a spoiled girl whose mother goes to the bookstore looking for a book about witches. When the shopkeeper can’t find the book, the mother returns home with a real witch. She hopes that this witch will be able to make her daughter happy. But the witch does not make things easy. She is very grumpy and doesn’t want to talk to the little girl. Little by little, love begins to grow between them as the girl and the witch start to understand each other… a little… through the help of books.

The second story is called “Where is Rye?” (“¿Dónde está Centeno?”) it tells of a mother’s desperate attempt to protect her family from the pain a divorce might cause them. She brings home a dog. Even though she has never liked dogs at all, she would do anything to give her son the thing he’s always wanted most to help him get through a difficult time for the family. But it turns out that Rye, which is the dog’s name, gets lost… more precisely Rye runs away with Zunilda, a female dog from the neighborhood who was mistreated by her owner. Rye is with Zunilda but he misses his family. Alba is with her family but she desperately misses Rye. The love that brought them together, from different and unexpected places, could be the solution to their problems. And in the end they find the solution together.

 “Ducky Rodríguez” (“Patito Rodríguez”) tells of a very uptight duck, who doesn’t like anything to be out of place, who follows the same routine every day, at the same time, with the same expression and the same hairdo. A very organized duck. Until one day a girl duck appears. Brave is her name, and she turns his life upside down as she proposes new things, different things, other worlds, broader horizons. But love becomes possible when they realize they can remain true to themselves even though the other one is different.

First published in 2000, Sinful Capão (“Capão Pecado”) marked an era and became one of the most talked about works of marginal literature.

In Sinful Capão, lives are worth very little, almost nothing. Everything is always hanging by a thread. As Ferréz writes, “the future is further ahead, much further ahead”. So far ahead that it’s often too late.
Rael is a teenager who wants to get away from the atrocious environment of violence in which he grew up. A dedicated son, he endeavours to get a good job. But his destiny is about to change when he falls in love with Paula, his friend’s girlfriend.

This book, which has already won over legions of readers in Brazil and around the world with its brutal and relentless story, is now in its sixth revised edition, with an afterword by Marcelino Freire. By narrating the dark underbelly of an utterly unequal society, where machismo and cruelty dictate the rules, this novel reveals its overwhelming force and its power to provoke new reflections.

Practical Handbook of Hatred (“Manual prático do ódio”) was called “a punch in the stomach” by the critics. It tells the story of Régis, Lúcio Fé and other favela dwellers, who can’t wait to pull off the big heist that will finally make them rich. They don’t care about harming those they live alongside, creating a world full of hatred and violence. In this drastic yet captivating novel, Ferréz shows the darkest and dirtiest sides of life in the favela.

Ferréz’ novel God Went Out For Lunch (“Deus foi almoçar”) is about the apparently calm life of the middle-aged public official Calixto. When he is left by his wife and his daughter, it could be a turning point for him. Although unable to adapt to his new situation, he cannot decide to take a new step either and stays trapped in a life that from the bottom of his heart he is longing to change. With this realistic and well-observed novel, Ferréz takes a close look at the Brazilian middle class for the first time.

The most important writer from the so-called marginal literature of Brazil, Ferréz, from São Paulo, makes his debut in the infantile-juvenile genre with Emerald Dawn (“Amanhecer Esmeralda”). In a beautifully illustrated edition, the author tells how the daily life of Emerald, a black girl and resident of a poor community, is being altered by gestures of love that improve her self-esteem. According to Ferréz, the character was inspired by a child who attended his lectures and impressed him with a haughtiness comparable to the great African nobles.

“Besides, you have to be constantly suspicious of your memories. In the end, recollections always contain a certain amount of invention, don’t they?”
How does one record the traces left by another person over the course of a lifetime: what becomes a memory and what is discarded? Here are twenty-four moments, photos that freeze for an instant the relationship between Vera and Cecilia, which began in a neighbourhood square when they were only three years old. Framed by the events that have shaken the country for several decades – the shadow of the Malvinas war and the dictatorship, economic crises, cultural changes – these scenes speak of the chiaroscuro of friendship. From childhood games, complicity and jealousy to first love experiences, couples, children, losses, fights and reunions. There is a family secret that is pursued. A mother who silences. Through these frozen moments, the author manages to allow the reader to see, literally, these two women who share their lives for fifty years.
24 Photos (“24 fotos”) is an exciting and agile novel, which establishes Andrea Ferrari as a writer for literature lovers of all ages.

“I’m ashamed of many things: my extremely long arms, my enormous feet, my ungainly body that I can’t even conceal with extra-large overalls. Also of the fact that my mum is pregnant (because who wants a little brother when they’re 14?). But most of all I’m ashamed of my face: a constellation of infinite pimples. So it was great when the world came to a halt with the pandemic and the all-covering face masks arrived. With my face hidden, I became a different person, someone capable of doing things I could never have imagined. Plus, I met Liz. And Melina: that was the best thing of all.
In Behind the Mask (“Detrás de la máscara”), Andrea Ferrari talks about the questions, insecurities, and decisions that arise during the teenage years: What do we show of ourselves? What do we want to hide? How do we face the gaze of others?”

The Picture of Verónica G. (“El retrato de Verónica G.”) refers to an advertising image of a beautiful young girl, Verónica, and its impact, told from the point of view of Lucía, one of her best friends. When Verónica is discovered as a model, her image invades the city, on billboards and in magazines. It provokes admiration and envy and even a ects Verónica’s relationships with her closest friends. They discuss the importance of appearance in all areas of life, and manipulation in the social media. They become distant, and when Verónica starts having problems with her boyfriend, she feels left alone. Society’s focus on the appearance is questioned by a growing group of people: at the same time that the photo makes Verónica famous, a women‘s movement in the world explodes against the mandate of traditional beauty. #fuckbeauty is the slogan that takes over the streets. In a dialogue with “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde, this sharp and contemporary novel for 14-year-olds speaks of the privileges associated with beauty and the humiliations of achieving it, captivating the reader until the very end of the novel, and beyond.

The Equals (“Las iguales”) is a story of twins, of how you live when you have someone who is almost the same as you… but not quite. At the age of 10 Vivi meets a boy, Luciano, and begins to feel the need to stop doing everything together with her sister Vicky. Vicky, on the other hand, doesn’t understand this and even feels offended, leading to conflict between the sisters. Alternating by chapters entitled “Vivi” and “Vicky” respectively, the story is told with the two voices of the twins as they speak to Marta, a psychologist who interviews them following an incident at school when Vicky posed as Vivi for an exam. The voices are as different as the girls’ personalities, who ultimately learn to love each other by recognizing each other’s different personalities. A novel that invites us to dive into the preferences and conflicts of two girls as they discover their identity.

Sol Linares is an atypical teenager. Cynical and lonely, she spent her childhood in the editorial office of a newspaper and always knew she would be a journalist. Her opportunity comes when, next to the hotel where a crowd of girls await the appearance of their favourite musician, she finds the body of a murdered man. With a harsh look at the world of journalism, The Speed of Music (“La velocidadde la música”), the first instalment of the series Sol by Night (“Sol de noche”), immerses its protagonist in the field of music and its fans to trace the motives for a crime. At the same time, Sol will begin to look into another, more disturbing mystery that lurks within her family. In The Signs of the Lie (“Las marcas de la mentira”), she faces the dubious circumstances surrounding her mother’s death, while in The Noise of Success (“El ruido del éxito”), Sol enters into the ups and downs of a loving relationship and discovers the truth of her family past.

Chimpanzees Look Into The Eye (“Los chimpancés miran a los ojos”) is a novel conceived with intelligence and sensitivity. It achieves what is so difficult for any narrator: to capture the reader’s attention from the beginning, and to keep him or her interested in the story both for the development of the plot and for the characters. The creation of a narrative voice in the first person, authentic and convincing, is one of the main successes of this work. But so is the accuracy of the story, the psychological intensity of each situation, and the carefully measured manner in which conflicts are presented. With this novel, the Argentinean author Andrea Ferrari shows again her narrative clairvoyance, which places her at the forefront of the writers of children’s and young people’s literature in her country.

Ana is fifteen years old and has a parallel life in a virtual world. There, she transforms into Ishara, a beautiful and tough warrior. But how long can she close her eyes to the secret hidden in her real life? A novel that shares techniques with cinema, Zoom immerses us in an agile plot in which the action moves forward and backward as if seen through a camera, which sometimes zooms in and finds the unexpected.

Francisco Méndez is fourteen years old, has an extraordinary intelligence and a passion: Sherlock Holmes books. Not only does he know more about the famous detective than anyone else, he also thinks like him. His family and friends expect his intellectual brilliance to make him famous, but these expectations burden Francisco, who doubts himself. In Sherlock’s Path (“El camino de Sherlock”), three strange murders of women in his neighbourhood serve as a test and lead Francisco down a fascinating path. Humour and police intrigue are combined in this magnificent novel.
In It’s Not Easy Being Watson (“No es fácil ser Watson”), Francisco Méndez dives into another case. This time it is his friend and assistant Arturo who tells the story. But this “Watson” brings with him his own anxieties, a difficult love affair and eternal doubts about his role as the second wheel, the slow one, the one who seems to be there only to let Sherlock’s mind shine. It’s just not easy being Watson.
After college, the paths of Francisco and Arturo – or Sherlock and Watson, according to their nicknames – seem about to go their separate ways. Unable to maintain a social life or get close to women, Francisco turns to his new job as a detective’s assistant. Arturo, on the other hand, just wants to enjoy the holidays in good company. But he can’t help being drawn into the events that shake his friend’s life: the case of a famous stolen painting that puts him in mortal danger, and the reappearance of the beautiful and disturbing Violet. Don’t Call Me Bond (“No me digas Bond”) is the last part of this trilogy.

Youth – and in particular adolescence – is an explosive, exuberant time. But being a kid during a dictatorship, like the one in Argentina in the 1970s, is a different game. It demands not only courage, but also a dose of mischief. The narrator of Valecuatro is in secondary school when the dictatorship errupts; however, nothing changes. Everything still seems normal. Until he perceives the terror that overwhelms the papier-mâché scenario set up by the authorities. And he discovers that, in addition to the challenges that beset every adolescent boy – his place in society, sex, love, a reality so unfair that it revolts – his situation entails other dangers. For the body, yes, but above all for the soul.

The title that gives the novel its name is an allusion to the most popular card game in Argentina: truco. When the “vale cuatro” is called, the bet reaches its limit. It doesn’t matter if at that moment you have an unbeatable play or just a couple of useless cards. What counts is the conviction with which the bluff is held, the firmness in the look, the decision to go all in even when you have little or nothing.

With humour and sensitivity, Marcelo Figueras’s new novel asks what happens when the world becomes frightening and, instead of ‘feigning insanity’, everyone feigns normality. In that emergency, even if bad cards are dealt, there is no choice but to find a way to win the game.

All Demons Are Here (“Todos los demonios están aquí”) is a fascinating story that combines narrative talent with some real events in recent Argentinian history. Tomás Pons is a histrionic psychiatrist, popular among his colleagues at the Alvear Hospital. Recently separated from the mother of his only child, with more outgoings than income and little prospect of improvement, he receives an offer he can’t refuse: a senior position at a private clinic he has never heard of, located on a remote island in the Tigre delta. The clinic is an old, well-kept mansion surrounded by lush vegetation. Patients wander through the garden and there seems to be a harmony, an unearthly tranquillity. Little by little, Pons begins to notice strange movements and witnesses extreme situations that are resolved with unusual violence. He also discovers inscriptions from Dante’s Divine Comedy on the walls. Questions are piling up: Who really owns the hospital? Why do they withhold information about the patients? What is the role of the beautiful Sophía, who seems to know all the institution’s secrets? With a devilish plot, the new novel by Marcelo Figueras is a fascinating literary adventure that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

In The Black Heart of Crime (“El negro corazón del crimen”), Figueras devotes himself to the Argentinean cult author of Irish descent Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977), a true icon of Latin American literature. He reconstructs those months of investigation during which Walsh’s most emblematic book, Operation Massacre (“Operación Masacre”), was born. But he also narrates the transformation of that young man into the Rodolfo Walsh we know today: the writer committed to his time, with politics understood as the defence of the weak and oppressed, and journalism that tells what not everyone wants to hear and to know.

Buenos Aires, 1956. A heinous crime pushes a fiction writer to become a detective. That decision puts an end to the life he had lived until then: it turns him into a fugitive, drives him into the arms of a forbidden romance, questions everything he believes in and puts him face-to-face with death.

The boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred, as in Figueras’s novel. Because that terrible crime existed. And the writer-detective, too. In 1956 he was twenty-nine years old and began to call himself Rodolfo J. Walsh.

Operation Massacre is recognized as one of the foundational pieces of investigative journalism, a work of non-fiction literature, written 9 years before In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Marcelo Figueras’s novel The King of Thorns (“El rey de los espinos”) is a fast-paced adventure novel that crosses the limits of the fantasy and science fiction genres. In 2019, a famous Argentine comic writer is killed by the Secret State Police. To the young gravedigger Milo’s amazement, at the funeral he recognizes four of the author’s characters, each apparently arising from another world and time. Together with Milo and his best friend Baba, the four try to find the author’s last unpublished manuscript, where all of them are supposed to meet for the first time. Did the author bring them all together in order to be resurrected? And what role is played by the author’s daughters, who fought against the dictatorial regime and disappeared without a trace? With strong and unique characters like these, Figueras develops an enthralling story that has more in common with our real world than we might think at first glance.

In Kamchatka, Marcelo Figueras tells the moving story of ten-year-old Harry whose parents are politically persecuted in the heat of 1980s Argentina. They take him to a house in the country, pretending to play a game and bravely trying to face a life deprived of everything they have known so far. In an attempt to escape a world gone mad, Harry seeks consolation in his imagination. In the end, though, all their precautions cannot save his parents… With simple but beautiful language and subliminal humour, Figueras draws the reader into the adolescent’s world.

The Warm-up Battle (“La batalla del calentamiento“) is a fairy tale-like story full of humour and spooky suspense. Pat and her daughter Miranda have been moving around until they meet Teo, who immediately falls in love with the beautiful Pat. But the three are by no means ordinary people: Miranda has magical powers, and Teo is a giant. And what exactly has Pat been running from? Did Miranda’s father really die as she claims?

“As silent as a fish,” they say of people who cannot or will not talk for whatever reason. And the protagonists of Marcelo Figuera’s latest work move through the novel like fish in an Aquarium: constrained in the prison of their own speechlessness. One of them is Ulises Rosso, who sets out for Israel to look for his children, which his wife has taken away from him. He feels like a monster who destroys all relationships, yet he is powerless to change his situation. Arrived in a country where he is taken for a Palestinian because of his skin colour and treated accordingly, Ulises meets the artist Irit Rosenblum  and falls in love. Her soul too has been caught up in a cocoon since she lost her husband in an Intifada attack. The two of them have no language in common, and yet they understand one another.

Parallel to this story we follow Miriam and David, a couple who spent years trying for a child, only to lose their baby after a premature birth. She withdraws into a world of fish, which swim around like her “fish child” in its amniotic fluid. The couple are drawn to the local aquarium over and over again – a habit that David keeps up even after his wife’s death, as a way to feel close to her.

And finally, the child Danny plays a role. Irit takes him in after he is found on the street. He plays dumb, rejects any physical contact and his only communication is through drawings, usually of fish. That gives Irit the idea of taking Danny to the aquarium – where they meet David. Like in a play driven along in acts by the individual characters, like in a waltz in three tempos, Figueras has written a novel as dramatic as it is accomplished. He sketches out his character’s inability, regardless of their sex, age or cultural origin, to express themselves in words, yet without refusing communication and loving understanding in itself.

A wonderful book, dramatic, moving, scarred by pain and loss, complex and intense, yet beyond the unhappy end it has a much more important message: that of hope!

Gus is considered the most troublesome cricket at school. The fact that his mother is the local mayor doesn’t make things any easier. Gus is also tormented by the fact that he doesn’t know his father, who left when he was very young. Fortunately, Gus has the generous affection of his grandfather, who also feeds his imagination with tales of crickets that have travelled far away; tales that feed his grandson’s desire for adventure and his need to know what has become of his father. The situation is complicated when the prosperous merchant Peake becomes ambitious for the post of mayor and decides to attack the mayoress at her weak point: her son. To defend Amanda, with whom he has fallen in love, Gus gets into a fight with Rolf, a fellow thug and Peake’s relative who is accidentally injured. Peake manages to put the mayor in the dilemma of having to accept the request to expel Gus from school. Then a curious character arrives in town, a giant cricket who travels the world on a motorbike, and Gus decides to go with him to save his mother from the trouble he has caused her. The two separate without having broken the isolation that makes them suffer.