I Hope You Get Deported: A Journey Through American Dystopia (“Tomara que você seja deportado: Uma viagem pela distopia Americana”) is a dive into a devastating scenario from any point of view, highlighting the magnitude of the existential crisis in American society. The book was chosen among the best releases in Brazil in 2025, was praised by the press in dozens of articles, and was the best-selling book at the International Literary Festival in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro.

Covering the period between Donald Trump’s election campaign and the beginning of the eugenic efforts of his immigration policy, the American tragedy here takes on a face and materiality. Chade travels through the places where hatred and resentment, poverty and illusion spread, from Manhattan to the wall with Mexico, from a historic rally at Madison Square Garden to shelters for deportees in border cities. In journeys of thousands of kilometers through 15 American states, what the reader glimpses is a humanitarian, ethical, political, and spiritual disaster.

The unmistakable atmosphere of persecution, the immigrant’s fear of being hunted. But also the perversity of the Trumpist offensive regarding other issues, such as education and the rights of LGBTQIA+ people, once relevant to the composition of a scenario, a world order, that glorified the nation that appropriated the term “America.”

In the words of Walter Salles, winner of the 2025 Oscar for Best Director, who presents this book, it is “not only an extraordinary journalistic work, but also a highly lucid essay on how democracies can succumb.”

The journalist’s work here, also marked by personal experience, reveals the symbolic crumbling of the solidity that consecrated the United States of America as the most powerful nation in the world. A nation that demolishes itself with the reckless blows of an authoritarian leader.

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.

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.

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.

In The Courtyard of Shadows (“O Pátio das Sombras”), a boy lives with his family in a village. One day, his grandmother refuses to go to the fields, saying she is tired. While they are working, the family hears the sounds of a party coming from the village, and they all wonder if his grandmother might have visitors. The boy goes to take a peek, but finds his grandmother alone. The same thing happens repeatedly, leaving the boy increasingly confused, until his grandmother explains it to him, teaching him a beautiful lesson about life and death.

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.

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.

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.”

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.’

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.

Margô and Dominique are two cute, spoilt little dogs who live the high life at Sítio Bambuzal, surrounded by lush plants and curious animals. The sisters’ peaceful existence, however, comes to an end when a baby chick, and then a kitten, are found dead. It was enough for Hermes, their guardian, to remind them that they were animals with a hunting instinct for the ‘plush sisters’ to become the prime suspects and end up in trouble. Unwilling to accept this and determined to clear their names (and get back to their good life), they take on the role of detectives and launch an investigation to discover who is behind the mysterious crimes.

Plush Detectives (“Detetives de pelúcia “) was the first children’s book by Andrea del Fuego and marked her entry into the world of stories for young readers, with the biting humour and sharp eye that were already her trademark in her adult novels. Now it is being reissued by Escarlate, with the text revised by the author and brand-new illustrations by Kaká Leal, which enhance the interplay between sweetness and suspicion that drives the plot. A plot full of red herrings, surprising allies — including even a certain Scottish ghost pirate — and a pair of clever investigators who are much more than just cute.

A mythical place of childhood, but also of madness. An archive of our history, and of its mystery. A naive refuge, or a hiding place for ghosts and fantasies. How many lives can fit into an attic?

The narrator in Attic (“Sótão”), a young woman with two little daughters, has finally split up with her violent partner. It was all too similar to the relationship she witnessed as a child between her mother and her abusive stepfather. Now she has moved into the first place she can call her own, an attic flat, where she tries to write her way into a new life. The attic becomes a place of refuge, of memories from her childhood and her loving biological father, of writing herself free. A place both real and imagined.
Amidst the dust and the creaking of wood, the narrator revisits intimate episodes, memories of violence and relationships that have left their mark; she balances between the learning of independence and the tenderness of motherhood, showing how the body learns to adapt to solitude.

Written in a hesitant, poetic style that strives for precision, Madalena Sá Fernandes depicts the narrator’s struggle with herself and her fears; as the novel progresses, it also becomes a story of self-empowerment and a tentative victory.

Taking the Helm (“Leme”) is the autofictional story of a toxic relationship. In her literary debut, Sá Fernandes deals with the domestic violence she herself experienced as a child at the hands of her stepfather Paulo. He moves in with her and her mother when Madalena is just six years old, and he dominates the lives of the two women for twelve years with his controlling behaviour and outbursts of rage. The aggression is directed above all against her mother, who does not succeed in freeing herself from this relationship for a long time. For Madalena this is hard to bear, she experiences the undermining of the pillars that sustain human relationships and the distortion of the roles of parents and children. She has no choice but to settle into loneliness to overcome her fear and anger, to find a place for herself in the family chaos, and to find comfort in small victories in everyday life.
Later, when she herself was already in danger of repeating her mother’s behavioural patterns in her own relationship, she manages to free herself from this downward spiral. After Paulo’s death, Madalena revisits those years in images of her memories, and she writes to free herself from her stepfather for good. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after the separation, which was then treated with medication. Sá Fernandes succeeds in creating a sensitive portrait of a dysfunctional family, an almost astonished look from a child’s perspective at the absurdity and grotesqueness of what happened. This book is a moment of literary glory and a powerful act of self-empowerment to find one’s own way back into life.

A puzzle book, a scrapbook, a notebook of memories, a collection of notes against the voracity of the present, a eulogy to what matters most in life, a self-questionnaire without definite answers about adulthood and the state of the world – this is Drift (“Deriva”). From nostalgic family holidays to the painful experience of sleeping in a bed with bedbugs; from the slow learning of loneliness to the hatred of wedding parties that seem more like carnivals; from the martyrdom of insomnia to the arduous negotiations between mother and daughters; from the blind navigation of social networks to the conciliatory power of literature; from the rediscovery of therapy to a reunion with a first love: Drift wanders through subjects as diverse and unexpected as the witty or sharp angle that Madalena Sá Fernandes chooses to approach them. A book that confirms the literary resourcefulness of a writer who, looking at herself and her surroundings, gives each reader a kind of reflection in the mirror.

In January 2024, Lídia Jorge began contributing regularly to the opinion pages of the newspaper El País. This volume is a collection of thirty chronicles from that time period and before, one of the earliest being the piece that gives this book its title.

“The Sky Will Fall Upon Us” is the first line of a popular Afghan song, but when adapted as the title of a book of chronicles, its meaning broadens and takes on a global dimension. It captures both the spirit of menace in our times and, at the same time, the strength of resistance made possible by a lucid analysis of the facts.

Lucidity and resistance are perhaps the two words that emerge from these literary chronicles. And nothing could confirm this better than the speech delivered by the author in Lagos on 10 June 2025, during the celebrations of Portugal Day, Camões Day and Portuguese Communities Day. That speech sparked a controversy that in some way highlights the paradoxical circumstances of our times. In essence, with the texts now published in The Sky Will Fall Upon Us. 30 Chronicles and 1 Speech (“O Céu Cairá Sobre Nós. 30 Crónicas e 1 Discurso”), Lídia Jorge aims to “write letters of defiance against all that which history conceals.”

Dona Alberti lives in a nursing home in 2020. She has poor eyesight but assesses the circumstances and people around her with great clarity. She records what is happening, and her daughter transcribes the texts and gives them their literary force by following in the footsteps of this extraordinary character who has kept her memory intact, her imagination fertile, her curiosity for others and her genuine attention to the beauty of the world, while conversing with death as with a legitimate adversary. Relaying memorable moments in the relationship between mother and daughter, Mercy (»Misericórdia«), is a compendium of vital force and faith in life. A story that is at once brutal, ironic and kind, a mixture of tears and laughter that is unforgettable. It shows us an exceptional woman driven by the immortality of hope. A true literary achievement, an admirable testimony to the human condition.

In Every Sense (“Em Todos os Sentidos”), a collection of forty-one chronicles that Lídia Jorge read over the course of a year on Rádio Pública, Antena 2, there are chronicles that face the fury of the contemporary world head-on, interpreting its challenges, dangers and simulacra with a sharp critical eye. But the singularity of these pages of intervention comes, above all, from the fact that the author is capable of combining on the same stage of reflection critical thought about reality and subjective discourse of intimate memory, together with a deeply felt gaze. Inside this book there are unforgettable pages about human life.

Lídia Jorge’s novel Estuary (“Estuário”) is located in present-day Lisbon. The main character is Edmundo Galeano, the youngest son of a shipowning family. After a wrong investment decision by the eldest brother, their possessions are reduced to a house at the mouth of the Tagus and two ships at anchor costing money instead of generating it. In vain the father writes letters to the relevant minister, who was once the boyfriend of his daughter. Edmundo returned three months ago from a posting with a refugee organization in Africa. He lost part of his right hand in an accident in Kenya’s Dadaab, the continent’s largest refugee camp. He now tries to learn again to write by copying out lines from the “Ode Marítima” by Fernando Pessoa. He is planning a book about the tremendous suffering he has seen in Africa, but his father’s suicide and the bad luck that hits his family redirect his interest to his own world and the familiar people around him. In the end he can only write about them.

Estuary is a book about the vulnerability of a man, a family, a society and the very equilibrium of the Earth. A novel of great poetic power about the urgent questions of our time.

Those We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis”) tells the intriguing story of a number of participants in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974. When the journalist Ana Maria is asked to make a documentary about this historic event for a US TV channel, she returns to her native Lisbon. Looking for more information in her father’s house, who was also a journalist, she finds a photo of some revolutionaries, taken some time after the event. As she discovers, they all have their own stories to tell, and their personal experiences will change Ana Maria’s perception of her country forever. Written with great psychological subtlety and power of language, Os Memoráveis is a fascinating literary contemplation of Portugal’s arduous road to democracy.

The Night of the Singing Women (“A Noite das Mulheres Cantoras”) is written with great psychological subtlety and power of language. The student Solange, a member of an all-girl band, witnesses the charismatic lead singer Gisela pressurising young Madalena because she is pregnant, and then covering up her death. Many years will pass before Solange can face up to these events again – and to Gisela, the woman she admired so much back then.

We Shall Fight the Shadows (“Combateremos a Sombra”) is a courageous and political novel about our times and about Portugal in the era of globalisation. It tells the fascinating story of three months in the life of the psychiatrist Osvaldo Campos. In the night of the 31st December 2000, he runs into Rossiana, an assistant radiologist, who has just seen a drug courier die in her clinic when a package burst inside his intestines. The clinic is clearly working together with the drug smugglers. Because she knows too much, she is to be killed, but can hide in the house where Osvaldo works. A love affair develops between her and the psychiatrist.

The immediacy of these events finally shakes Osvaldo awake, and through his patents’ stories and traumas he uncovers a conspiracy trafficking in drugs and human beings, in which important public figures are implicated. Suddenly, the evil gets too much for him. “Lying is connected with death”, he writes in his notebook. He has to act, so he turns to the press. The novel also passes on a message of hope, despite its bleak view of our present.

In the book, Portugal is subjected to a constant downpour. Bridges collapse and the water takes everything with it, including corpses. This apocalyptic vision reflects that of a depressive country, where lethargy and apathy have spread like the floodwater – where, in the author’s words, “the chemists have sold out of sedatives”. The title Combateremos a sombra puts salt in the wound and is an attempt to stir awareness for the injustices which are all too common in Portugal and around the world. With the narrative force we have come to expect, Lídia Jorge invites us to join her in a gripping reading experience.

The novel The Wind Whistling in the Cranes (“O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas”) was published in 2002 and has been awarded the prize of the Günter Grass Foundation, ALBATROS, in 2006. Grandmother Regina Leandro has fled from hospital and is later found dead in front of the entrance to the old cannery in Valmares. Milene, the grand-daughter who lived with her, is the only one there to organise her funeral; her other relatives are away on holiday. Milene, a rather simple-minded person, now tries to find the right words to describe their grandmother’s death to the relatives. The Leandro family, Milene’s aunts and uncles, belong to the wealthy upper-class. The old factory – founded in 1908 – is meantime being rented and lived in by a large family from Cabo Verde. Milene, totally exhausted by the events surrounding the death of her grandmother and initially speechless, is cordially welcomed into that family and stays with them over night.

Thus The Wind whistling in the Cranes is set in two worlds: on the one hand, the history of the cannery, Milene’s aunts and their husbands and men friends, her cousins, all intent on insuring that their reputation is not tarnished by the lonely death of the old woman. All kinds of interests have to be defended, political and financial. The factory is to be sold; the site close to the beach is ideally located for a modern building project. On the other hand, there is the family from Cabo Verde, the old Ana Mata, her daughters and grand-children. A shy relationship develops between Ana Mata’s widowed but young grand-son Antonio, a crane-driver and father of two children, and Milene. When the Leandros finally discover this, they are horrified.

The atmosphere in the novel is coloured by Milene’s unprejudiced view of the people and the events. Looked upon by her relatives as the poor childish orphan, in the very restrictedness of her small world and in all her innocence Milene displays great human warmth and courage.

In her novel The Painter of Birds (“O Vale da Paixão”), the author again takes her readers back to the world of her childhood. The scenery this time is the old house Valmares, in a village in the south of Portugal. The house is still inhabited by the patriarch, his son and his wife and grandchildren. The other children have left home, emigrated, built up a new life for themselves far away. The decades pass the old house by, and increasingly tourism encroaches upon the rural, isolated life – a sign too of the fundamental changes in Portuguese society over the past fifty years. In the meantime, the granddaughter weaves a dense image based on her memories and full of longing for her real father, who went off and left her mother as a young man, returning only once, when she was fifteen years old. With the story of this loving relationship between father and daughter, an image also emerges of the uncertain destiny of a house, a family, and “a society that neither knows what it is, nor what it should do with its rural past”, as the author once put it in an interview. As a result, much of what is presented in the book seems undecided. Dark gaps remain, full of silence and mystery. Lidia Jorge has again written a novel of melancholic beauty.

The novel The Garden without Limits (“O Jardim sem Limites”) takes place in a big old house somewhere in Lisbon. Julieta Lanuit, her husband and two children own the house and rent the first floor to very different young people. One of them starts narrating the stories of their lives, and like in a puzzle draws a complex picture of their dreams and frustrations, their conformity and revolt, their togetherness and their solitude.

Like many of her generation, the experience of the colonial war was decisive for Lídia Jorge: “The history of this war has yet to be written”, she commented. In her next novel, The Murmuring Coast (“A Costa dos Murmúrios”), she writes about it from the point of view of a woman. Twenty years after a period spent in Moçambique as the young wife of a war-struck officer, the narrator looks back on those months and all their ambiguity, in an attempt to gain some clarity on Africa. Estranged as they are from reality, the colonial lords still preserve their aspirations and notions and imagine themselves to be secure, although the uprising of the suppressed people intimates the approaching loss of their centuries old dominance in Africa. With this novel Lídia Jorge has written one of the most powerful books on the colonial war.