La Santita (“The Saint”) is an opening of cosmopoetic worlds in which the frontiers between body and spirit, culture and nature, feminine and masculine, playful and rational, science and magic fade away. In seven stories, the author organises universes in which mangroves, chickens, volcanic rocks, ashes, Obi-Wan Kenobi or Cristal meet and weave links that bring into play the existence of other realities (not necessarily Western) that escape the limits of time and space and the living and the dead. Inspired by the cosmologies of the Andean world and its deep violences, Moscoso makes magic with words, invents rhythms and brings references from popular culture together with another ancestral pop culture.
A puzzle of references so recognisable in Moscoso’s imaginary and in so many places in America. Posters of Chayanne and Hello Kitty among precarious dwellings, random vegetation, empty lots, houses made of unpainted and unplastered bricks, endless cities and buildings that shine in the sun, the smell of fried food and coriander. Neon and cumbia. Virgins and Star Wars. We are, perhaps, facing a literature of the end of the world.

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.

The young Sausan spends many hours in her father‘s library. Condemned to a life in the same place because of her health, she discovers the diversity of the world through her books. She is certain that if she ever marries, it will be to a man with a cosmopolitan mind and a love of stories in his heart. When three admirers ask her to marry them, she sets them a task: they are to travel far and wide for eight years and bring her back one hundred birds at the end of that time. Sausan is convinced that people who live in a society characterised by conflict and enmity are unable to understand the true meaning of love. For this reason, she sends her three admirers far away. Set in the bloody period between 1988 and early 2000, Sausan witnesses the uprising against the regime that rules her country. Bachtyar Ali, known for his narrative art and stories full of magic, in Mansion of the Sad Birds (»Kshki Balinde Xemginekan«) delves deep into the soul of society in order to counter the emergence of violence in his region of origin.

Djamshid Khan has become thin behind thick prison walls. As light as paper, so that one day a gust of wind catches him and carries him away, beyond the walls of the prison and out into the wide world. Time after time he blows away, and time after time he begins a new life. In the army, as a ghost, as a prophet, as a lover, as a flying attraction – countless eddies carry the man away until he himself no longer knows who he once was and where he belongs. Only his nephew is looking for him, and for something that will return his uncle to his roots.
My Uncle Jamshid Khan: Who Has Always Been Taken by the Wind (“Jemşîd xanî mamim: ke hemîşe ba legel xoyda deybird”) is a weightless, touching, and also tragic story about getting lost, starting over and about the question of where we are actually heading.

In parallel with his groundbreaking novels, Bachtyar Ali has been publishing numerous essays and studies for decades. With The Dictator’s Smile (“Dwa xandai Diktator”), we discover him as a keenly observant, radical, and thought-provoking analyst. The central question is what obstacles stand in the way of enlightenment and peaceful development in the Middle East and the Arab world. Based on his own experiences and familiar with European traditions of thought, Bachtyar Ali seeks new ways to explain the omnipresent violence and fatal lack of perspective in his region.

When the flute is pressed into little Jaladat’s hand for the first time, he immediately elicits the sounds of the instrument, and everyone is enchanted. The old Sufi Ishaki Lewzerin takes Jaladat and his friend to the mountains to pass on his secret knowledge.

When the war and the bombing raids begin, the three flautists wander from village to village. Playing in a dance band in a huge, nameless city of brothels, Jaladat has to unlearn all his art of playing the flute, so as not to attract attention. The enigmatic girl Dalia protects him, initiates him in her secrets, and leads him to a path into the depths of his land, beyond our imagination.

The City of the White Musicians (“Shari Mosiqare Spiyekan”) is the monumental novel of a world in which death is ubiquitous and the arts bring unexpected salvation.

“Whenever he told lies, the birds would fly away. It had been that way since he was a child. Whenever he told a lie, something strange would happen.” So begins The Last Pomegranate Tree (»Duwahamin Hanary Dwniya«). Muzafar, a peshmerga fighter, has spent the last twenty-one years imprisoned in a desert yearning for his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was captured. Upon his release, he begins a frantic search, only to learn that Saryas was one of three identical boys who became enmeshed in each other’s lives as war mutilated the region. An inlet to the recesses of a terrifying historical moment, and a philosophical journey of formidable depths.

Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1980s: Two sisters, full of life and desire for freedom, face two different destinies in a city isolated by war. Parwana rebels, breaking with traditional conventions; Khandan loves and admires her older sister. In a complex social and political setting, where religion wields great influence, Parwana‘s only dream is to leave the country. When she runs away with her lover Feridoun to a remote mountain area called Ashqstan,  Khandan is sent with other girls who have sinful relatives to a special religious school. In a skilful blend of fantasy and reality, the author deftly portrays both the world of the runaway lovers and the confines of a strict religious school.

Parwana and Feridoun join a group of runaway lovers, all of them trying to escape from their oppressive families. But they seem to be unable to build a happy community because they have brought too much of the outside world with them. Finally, the religious extremists find and attack Ashqstan. Parwana is killed, and Khandan forced to watch. The evening later comes to be known as Parwana’s Evening (“Ewaray Parwana“).

For four more years Khandan lives in a strict Islamic school, where she has to learn how to subdue her soul and her body, so she doesn’t go the same way as her sister. After the first Gulf War, she leaves the school and sees the changes in the world after a destructive war. Her only wish is to find out her sister’s lost story, the story of the courage of somebody who followed her hopes without fearing death. Her journey draws Khandan into a search for a God who does not oppose love, a God who has been missing from her life for so long.

The whole novel is an insightful journey through the soul of Middle Eastern society, its divisions and fatal fallings out; an interpretation of the fanatical and strictly religious side set against the desire to live freely without restrictions from religious and social forces.

Iraqi Kurdistan at the turn of the twenty-first century is a territory ruled by strongmen, revolutionaries, fixers, bureaucrats and the “Barons” who control everything from livestock and land to Kurdish cultural life.

Defying the absolute power wielded by the Barons, a band of friends led by a poet embarks on an odyssey to find the bodies of two lovers killed unjustly by the authorities. The Barons respond by attempting to crush these would-be avengers, though their real war is waged against the imagination itself – a prized, elusive commodity for which intellectuals, merchants, political elites and humble workers all search in one way or another.

I Stared at the Night of the City („Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination“)  is a trip, in more ways than one: a tale of extraordinary people traveling great distances, in their minds or with their feet. It is a lyrical interpretation of contemporary Kurdistan, so much in the news nowadays but otherwise so little understood. Told by several unreliable narrators in a kaleidoscope of fragments that all eventually cohere, the novel manages the neat trick of dipping readers into a fantasia just long enough before wrenching them back to hard, cold ‘real life’.

Periscope

Durruti is a feared and respected figure in the criminal underworld. His business involves stolen cars, dismantling them and selling their parts, and other related activities, typical of his field. But above all, his business is keeping order: ensuring that no one does anything he doesn’t approve of, that the police and the political authorities, with whom he has a cast-iron pact, are not forced to overact and break the criminal harmony by actions that aren’t part of the script. It isn’t easy to keep everyone in line. It would only take one spark in the wrong place at the wrong time to upset the balance.
Life unfolds. A man is jealous of his wife and follows her with unexpected consequences. A mother is happy about her daughter’s promotion, unaware that she isn’t exactly working as a secretary in that sought-after downtown apartment. Her sister always wanted her to learn her spiritual wisdom from her; who knows, it might have saved the young woman.
The spark ignites; that disturbance, slowly, precipitates others; each one greater than the last. The younger foot-soldiers murmur and stop following orders; the neighbourhood becomes unsettled; outbursts and improvisation take over. The spiral of violence expands and encircles them all. Suspicion replaces secrecy and respect; the old order is shaken, waiting for a new one to arrive, and this is not necessarily good news.
In Scrapyard (“Desarmadero”), Eugenia Almeida makes full use of the codes of the noir series to construct a storyline where corruption and crime reach all layers of society. With terse writing and an extraordinary mastery of the oral register, she tells a great story based on small events that produce uncontrollable consequences. Its plot could be set in any Argentinean city, its characters scrambling to escape the abyss that opens up before them.
The final sentence sounds both consoling and optimistic: “I am going to help you”. But in reality, it condemns the poor devil to whom it is addressed to never again being free in his life, as had happened to Durruti because of his love for his little brother, the Nene, and as will happen to everyone because the system is bigger than all of them.

A personal alphabet that aims to find the meaning of writing in a cluster of stories that connect with her life through secret passages. This is the form that Eugenia Almeida gives Flooding. The Secret Language We Are Made Of (“Inundación. El lenguaje secreto del que estamos hechos”), a book that crosses genres, dragging and revealing traces of experience, strands of stored emotions, voices, absences, desires.
The author writes Flooding as a long, wide-ranging letter, at a solitary fair, to a recipient who Almeida herself postulates, consolidates and enchants in their existence, with the passionate commitment of “that function of the species”, which is language. The pleasures and displeasures of an act of writing that is done “with the whole body”.

Eugenia Almeida’s superbly written crime novel Threshold Tension (“La tensión del umbral”) is both a gripping story and an astute study of human behaviour.

Guyot, a brilliant but headstrong journalist with a tragic personal history, becomes obsessed with the suicide of a woman whose motives for killing herself seem connected to past events: a series of alleged murders and suicides relating to a highly feared criminal in league with the military. But what really happened? And how is Julia, the suicide victim, connected to those events? As Guyot digs deeper, the dark secrets about the desaparecidos begin to surface. At the same time more and more of those he involves in the case end up dead or injured. When his new lady friend Vera is threatened, Guyot has to make a painful decision.

Written in refreshingly straightforward language, this novel keeps the reader’s attention with its strong characters and the sheer force of its carefully constructed storyline.

The Room at the Back (“La pieza del fondo”) tells the quiet and tender story of a group of people who live on the edge of society and are still able to show solidarity to each other, in spite of pain and loneliness. An old and dishevelled man sits on the same bench every day, unmoving and silent. Only Sofía, a harassed waitress in a run-down bar, tries to help. When he disappears, a whole set of parallel events are set in motion.

The Bus (“El colectivo”): A small town in the Argentinean provinces. A bar, where an unknown couple are waiting for the bus. As are Marta and Antonio Ponce, whose sister wants to depart. Clouds are drawing close in the sky, without bringing rain, as always. But something peculiar happens: The barriers of the railway crossing, abandoned long ago, are lowered and the bus roars past the bar without stopping. No one can leave the little town.

The Ponces have lived here for 32 years – as a wealthy lawyer, Antonio, seemingly on the wrong side of the rails, in the poor quarter. At the time, Marta became pregnant and Ponce felt obliged to ask for her hand in marriage. When she lost the child, it seemed too late to him to cancel the wedding. But she hadn’t even wanted to marry him and confessed she had only given in to him that night out of pity. This he never forgave her. He sought revenge by forcing her to a monotonous life at his side.

The accelerating bus turns into a spectacle, drawing in larger crowds every night. Confusion prevails, only the lovers make their way on foot along the rails. In the meantime, at the small police station, incidents follow in quick succession. Orders are now given by the military and at dead of night it comes to a shootout on the railway tracks. The next morning, the barriers are lifted; the Ponces are once more on their way to the bar, for once again, the bus stops for the passengers. At last it rains. The newspapers report the death of two dissidents. Who could ever be able to recognise the couple from the bar on the blurry photograph?

In sober prose, the author draws on her diffuse childhood memories of the dictatorship, to tell of internal and external suppression and its fatal consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quase memória (“Quasi Memoir”) is a book of wonderful storytelling that shows a different Brazil and a world long gone, where living life was deemed more important than gain. One evening, Carlos Heitor Cony receives a letter from his late father. Seeing his handwriting evokes past adventures with the man who managed to make life exciting even in the direst circumstances. An insightful and heart-warming story that expertly blends fiction with facts, combining personal reminiscence with the Rio de Janeiro of the 1930s to 50s.

Cony’s latest novel, A morte e a vida (“Life and Death”), deals with the controversial topic of euthanasia. Nurse Vilma is dedicated to her work. When Edmundo asks her to help his wife Maria Emília to die a painless death in the last stages of cerebral cancer, she is reluctant. Slowly, the two of them get emotionally involved…