Mia Couto Libri

This collection features essays from a distinguished author recognized with prestigious awards, including the Camões Prize and the Neustadt Prize. It offers a unique perspective on various themes, reflecting the author's insights and experiences. The essays delve into cultural, social, and literary topics, showcasing the depth and breadth of the author's thought-provoking commentary. Readers can expect a rich exploration of ideas that resonate across different contexts and engage with contemporary issues.

New and selected fiction, over half in English for the first time, from the winner of the 2014 Neustadt Prize.

Set against the backdrop of the war between the Kingdom of Gaza, one of the last great pre-colonial African kingdoms, and the Portuguese colonialists, a young African woman Imani and the Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo have shared an unexpected love. While Germano is left behind in Africa, serving with the Portuguese military, Imani is enlisted to serve as interpreter to the imprisoned emperor of Gaza, Ngungunyane, on the long voyage to Lisbon. For Ngungunyane and his seven wives, it will be a journey of no return. Whereas Imani will come back only after a decade-long odyssey through the Portuguese empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the third novel of his acclaimed Sands of the Emperor trilogy, Couto supplies a voice to those silenced by the horrors of colonialism. As he depicts the beauty and terror of war and love, and reveals the devastation of a profoundly unequal clash of cultures, he gives a uniquely personal voice to a little-known period of history.

As the civil war rages in 1980s Mozambique, an old man and a young boy, refugees from the war, seek shelter in a burnt-out bus. Among the effects of a dead passenger, they come across a set of notebooks that tell of his life. As the boy reads the story to his elderly companion, this story and their own develop in tandem. Written in 1992, Mia Couto’s first novel is a powerful indictment of the suffering war brings.

18 short stories which look at the issues of civil war, petty officialdom and curruption against the backdrop of post-independence Mozambique. They tell the wider Mozambican story through tales of individual men and women, and contain many strange and fantastic incidents.

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017 A finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize My sister Silência was the most recent victim of the lions, which have been tormenting our village for some weeks now... When Mariamar Mpepe's sister is killed by lions, her father imprisons her at home. With only the ghost of her sister for company, she dreams of escape, and of the hunter who abandoned her years before. I'm the last of the hunters. And this is my last hunt. Archangel Bullseye, born into a long line of marksmen, is summoned back to Kulumani. But as he tracks the lions in the surrounding wilderness, his suspicions grow - that the darkest threats lie not outside the village, but at its very heart. What was happening was what always happened: The lions were coming back... Set in a forgotten corner of East Africa haunted by superstition, tradition and the shades of civil war, this is a struggle that blurs the savagery of nature, and the savagery of man.

A new translation of brilliant stories by Man Booker-finalist and author of Confession of the Lioness.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Gaza province of Mozambique is drowning in a torrent of war. Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, struggles with her cultural identity as she is torn between her VaChopi roots and the occupying Portuguese. Her life becomes further fractured as her family is broken apart amid the conflict. Germano, a sergeant wrestling with guilt and grandeur, attempts to subdue one of the last African kingdoms, but meanwhile falls in love with Imani and loses himself to an infectious madness. In this vivid and enchanting novel, Mia Couto masterfully interweaves history with folklore and has managed to create a work of rare originality and imagination.

Eleven when I saw a woman for the first time, I was seized by such surprise I burst into tears.

A powerful evocation of love, loyalty and war in 19th-century Africa