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

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.

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.

Ummi (“Ummi. Una historia de la migración palestina”) is an Arabic word which translates as “my mama”. Baboun has chosen to follow her Ummi as she reconstructs her family’s memory, moving freely between memory, chronicle and biography. Her recollections go back to Palestine, her ancestors’ decision to escape, and the struggle to build a new life in distant South America. Baboun lets her own Palestinian, Greek, and Chilean roots transform her novelistic style, using this research as a starting point to navigate the discovery of family secrets and stories. The book is also the story of the author trying to find her own cultural identity in Chile, the country with the largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East. Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, Isabel Baboun has written with masterclass a book that is as moving as it is unique.

In her novel The Thai Woman (“La tailandesa”), Baboun presents us with Diana, a woman in her forties, at the verge of a turning point of her life. She feels trapped in both her private and professional life, not really connected to nobody and not even to herself and her body. She feels betrayed by Maxi, the man with whom she is living in the same apartment, and by Nancy, her supposed best friend, who snatched a role offer from under her nose and is now the TV starlet she could have been, instead of remaining a teacher at the high school where she has already studied herself. Thai boxing gives her a kick, a glimpse of self-empowerment. But only acting on stage enables her – herself and Moisés, Nancy’s little son with whom Diana “rehearses” a borrowed motherhood – to take a break from reality and to really feel free, to follow only herself without any outer rules, and to be who she really is.
Like Mieko Kawakami, Baboun creates protagonists representing the contemporary woman, delving into different aspects of femininity and maternity, in an always entertaining, witty style and a highly original language. The Thai Woman is a feminist novel of archaic force.

The novel Kid (“Cría”) focuses on the relationship between the narrator Zina and her parents, whose influence she believes she has escaped from in recent years. Zina lives in a small town in southern Chile with Joan, an older American woman, while she pretends to her parents that she is based in California. Her father has repeatedly beaten his wife and daughter and bullied them, and her mother, otherwise self-confident and fun-loving, has never managed to free herself from this situation. When she asks Zina to come home urgently because her father has to undergo heart surgery and could die, Joan encourages Zina to go along with the request, but not to regard it as a return home as her mother would like, but merely as a temporary visit. Zina agrees, but feels an anxiety settle on her chest, a shadow that reminds her of the gloom of her parents’ home. When Zina arrives in Santiago, she is caught up in the margins of the social unrest that shakes Chile in autumn 2019, in particular its capital city after the brutal deployment of security forces on 18 October. These events reflect her father’s violence, from which there also seems to be little escape. Her parents’ influence is revealed to be fully intact when her father’s heart surgery leads to complications that require a partial lung transplant. Ever the good daughter, Zina follows her mother’s pleas to help her father, and her spirit of resistance only stirs when she is being prepared for her own operation and the anaesthesia begins to take effect…

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Elegant Terrorist (And Other Stories) (“O Terrorista Elegante (E Outras Histórias)”) is made up of three stories based on theatre plays written jointly by José Eduardo Agualusa and Mia Couto, commissioned by the theatre groups A Barraca, from Lisbon, and Trigo Limpo – Teatro ACERT, from Tondela in Northern Portugal. In The Elegant Terrorist, which gives its title to the book, an Angolan isarrested in Portugal for his alleged participation in acts of terrorism. The man claims to be able to fly and talks to a bird in prison, which seems to give him the necessary guidance to fulfil his mission. – „I come here to kill.“ This is how the protagonist of It Rains Love in the Street of the Killer (“Chovem Amores na Rua do Matador”), the second story, finally tries to make peace with his past: by killing the threewomen in his life. The city night plunges into chaos and, as the conflict unfolds in the dark streets, a masked stranger looks for someone to kill. In Black Box (“A Caixa Preta”), generations of the same familyare forced to face their best-kept secrets. Three delicious short novellas, full of humour and suspense, by two of the most popular and renowned fiction authors in Portuguese.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a look at an English extract on bookanista here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1967, shortly before Agustín Fernández Mallo was born, his father, a man originally from a village in León, a veterinarian by profession and a firm believer in science and progress, embarked on a pioneering journey through the United States with the aim of bringing twenty cows on a plane to Galicia. Almost half a century later, it is the author who makes his own journey through the American heartland, trying to retrace his father’s steps before the latter loses his memory.
Atom Heart Mother (“Madre de corazón atómico”) traces almost a century of Spanish history through a web of family stories and legends, about anonymous people who lived through the civil war, the post-war period, the return of democracy, and the turn of the century. As the narrator states, “life writes the fiction that we would never dare to write”.
This is the most powerful novel by the Agustín Fernández Mallo at his best; his most personal and, at the same time, most universal book, a narrative that deals with the entire human condition, and proposes to understand death not as the end of a journey, but as a beginning, the last lesson of life of a loved one.

When the world falls apart, only love remains.

Venice, sometime in the 21st century. Humanity is unknowingly heading towards extinction as a couple wander through the city, oblivious to the signs that herald the end of society as we know it. He is a Latin teacher enjoying a sabbatical year; she is a writer working on a book that brings together all the different forms of love. Without knowing it, they are both destined to play a pivotal role in the new world that emerges from the collapse. The Book of All Loves (“El libro de todos los amores”) is a novel about love, the great subject that has preoccupied artists, scientists and thinkers since the dawn of time. Or rather, it is a book about the micro-loves that surround us, and an enquiry into the different dynamics that love adopts, both in the intimate sphere of the couple and in other aspects of public life such as politics, economics or science.

Playing with styles and genres, skilfully mixing fiction, poetry and essay, Agustín Fernández Mallo has written a fascinating philosophical novel that radically believes in hope from the dystopia of the present.

In his novel Limbo, Fernández Mallo takes the reader on a fascinating road trip. Looking for the enigmatic “Sound of the End”, a Spanish man and his Mexican girlfriend, a former kidnap victim, cross the United States from east to west coast. Meanwhile, two musicians have the chance of theirs lives to record a CD. But the producer’s house in Brittany seems to hide a terrible secret. Creating an exciting and poetic atmosphere, Fernández Mallo connects his characters as if they were in a net, taking his readers to a place in limbo where it is hard to tell the present from the past, one place from the other, life from death. But it isn’t mystery that grips us, but something far more disturbing: reality.

When Nocilla Dream, the first part of a trilogy that can be read separately, erupted energetically onto the Spanish literary scene, it attracted enormous interest for both critics and the general public alike. It is considered an ‘alternative’ or post-modern novel, with a lopsided narrative that neither begins, nor ends. This isn’t literature as we have hardly ever seen it before, but rather a sort of elaborate collage of extracts.

In Nocilla Experience, the second part of the trilogy, multiple voices are distributed throughout the 112 fragments that make up the novel, from Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to scientific theories by Newton and Einstein. Distinct excerpts interweave and begin to form a patchwork of coincidences and complementary snippets of information that expose the solitude of the protagonists. Absolutely anything can be narrative material; anything other than boredom.

The first part of Nocilla Lab tells the story of the birth of the trilogy through an internal monologue that develops into a stream of consciousness from the protagonist. After being knocked down by a motorbike during a trip in Thailand, Agustín Fernández Mallo was left bedridden for four weeks and had the opportunity to divulge his experiences in this tripartite account. Seven years later, when he travels with his girlfriend to Cerdena, they come across an old penitentiary that has been converted into an agri-tourism site. A memory of reading Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance in Portuguese and a ‘No entry’ sign bring the first part of the story to a close. In the second part, the author’s voice disappears and gives way to a fragmented account that is accompanied by a succession of drawings, sketches and quotes about some of the characters inside the penitentiary. The third part of the book is a succession of post poetic flashes and varied etymologies – both ironic and distant – aside tributes to García Márquez, Wittgenstein, and Duras. The language adopts almost the tone of a comic and finishes with an encounter between Enrique Vila-Matas and the author on an oil rig.

I Always Return to the Nipples and to Proposition 7 of the Tractatus (“Yo siempre regreso a los pezones y al punto 7 del Tractatus”) is an intelligent and enjoyable soliloquy on the subjects of this world, starting from the loss of love and spanning all the way to language and its limits, which are perhaps also the limits of our own experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scalpel (“Bisturí”) is a dark novel about loss and vengeance. After becoming concerned about an illness, Santiago’s father consults Dr. Mansano and undergoes medical procedures that ultimately end his life. Santiago, determined to avenge his father’s death, murders Dr. Mansano. Although he acted with great caution, Santiago is forced to flee. On his journey, we learn about the thoughts that cross his mind and the small actions he has to take in order to avoid detection. With the help of his mother, friends, and family, he manages to go unnoticed, but on his return home, he discovers that everything he thinks he knows is, in reality, a lie

In Shared Rooms (“Habitaciones compartidas”) Roque, a professor of Hispanic literature in New Zealand, lives with his family far from his native Mexico. It is a quiet and even monotonous routine. One day he receives an email from Diego Valente, who has been hired by the same university and who, given his imminent arrival in New Zealand, asks for Roque’s advice on how best to acclimatise to his new environment. Diego arrives with the charming Lia and their two children. For Roque and his family, the arrival of Diego’s family seems providential, since they are the first fellow-Mexicans to come and live in the same place where they themselves have been living for the last seven years, and they hope this will bring some fresh air to their lives. However, what looks like a rosy future will become for both couples an almost nightmarish scenario, especially when Roque discovers that Diego brings with him a secret that is a heavy burden not only for him. Shared Rooms is a fascinating novel that, entering into the intricate relationships both within and between couples, explores with rare authenticity the deepest of human emotions: love, fidelity, inner exile and the meaning of our lives, all expressed in very agile prose and with a sharp sense of humour.

The Last Breakfast (“El último desayuno”) is a detective story based on real facts: the murder of a student on a university campus serves as the thread of the plot. Roque, the protagonist, is a Mexican professor at a New Zealand university. He has the impression that the police and his colleagues think he is responsible for the crime. In this situation, it does not help that after separating from his wife he is going through a period of mental instability, nor that he cannot remember the details of his relationship with Sara, the murdered student. While Roque tries to hide his fear and discomfort, he concentrates on finding a solution to all his problems and circumstances: the relationship with his ex-wife and children, his lovers, his role as resident in a foreign country. The author weaves a story of intrigue extending far beyond the detective story, where the real conflict is human frailty itself.

Rogelio Guedea’s latest novel Secret Lives (“Vidas secretas”) tells the story of a perfidious scheme. The Mexican Roque de la Mora teaches Spanish at a university in New Zealand. Although very attracted to his student Natasha, he resists her obvious advances – until he gets a nasty surprise.

The Crime of Los Tepames (“El crimen de Los Tepames”) is the last part of the captivating Colima trilogy. Two brothers are brutally murdered in the usually quiet town of Los Tepames. Abel finds out that some mining companies were quite interested in their land. As he digs deeper, he finds himself in a swamp of murderous corruption from which there is no escape. Once again, Guedea fascinates the reader with his strong language and his outstanding style. The book was among the bestselling books in Mexico’s most important bookstore, Librería Gandhi.

Colima/Mexico: in the heat of an election campaign, the governor’s brother is found assassinated with a 41-calibre bullet. Has he fallen victim to a serial killer or is the opposition party behind it? Based on a true story, the novel 41 paints a merciless picture of present-day Mexico.

In The Brothers Corona (“Conducir un tráiler”), the young Abel Corona goes looking for his girlfriend, taking a lift from a truck driver who is involved in the drugs trade. When he steals money from him, Abel starts fearing for his life. Then his brother Ismael is found dead, and Abel is confronted with an old family feud: a fight over land ending in death. Is he being lured into a trap, to fall victim to revenge?

Reading is a highly enjoyable craft, as Guedea shows in his narrative essay Business: reading (“Oficio: leer”). In the form of short fictional pieces based around the works of well-known writers such as Cioran, Bolaño, Greene, Pessoa, Kafka and García Márquez, he awakens our desire for turning pages.