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A Novel
by Mia Couto
A haunting novel about a father and son in the waning days of colonial Mozambique.
Diogo Santiago is a celebrated Mozambican poet and intellectual, a well-known professor at the university in his country's capital. In 2019, on the eve of a cyclone that will devastate the East African coast, he returns to his hometown of Beira to receive a tribute from his fellow citizens. As he travels across Mozambique, his mind returns to the past―to his own upbringing, and to the history of his country when it was still a Portuguese colony.
Diogo's father, himself a poet and a journalist, observed a terrible massacre committed during the waning days of the Estado Novo and was imprisoned by the PIDE, the Portuguese secret police. Diogo's reflections on his father's life are interspersed with found documents―letters, stories, entries in the journal kept by the PIDE agent who oversaw the case. As Cyclone Idai approaches Beira, threatening to wipe away the physical traces of the world in which he grew up, Diogo is forced to confront the impermanence of his own memories, too.
A haunting novel of historical witness, The Cartographer of Absences is one of Mia Couto's finest works. Drawing on the author's own life in colonial Mozambique, this book is a significant new entry in the world literature canon.
"Couto's storytelling is rich, while delivering a straightforward message: 'When a regime starts arresting poets it is because that regime has lost its way'...A contemplative study of colonialism's collapse, and its enduring legacy." —Kirkus Reviews
"In the rich latest from Couto, a poet reckons with the colonial history of Mozambique ... Revelations of murder and suicide shade the final act, which is made all the more gripping by a cyclone bearing down on the country. This packs a punch." ―Publishers Weekly
This information about The Cartographer of Absences was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mia Couto, born in Beira, Mozambique, in 1955, is one of the most prominent writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa. After studying medicine and biology in Maputo, he worked as a journalist and headed several Mozambican national newspapers and magazines. The author of Confession of the Lioness, The Tuner of Silences, and Sleepwalking Land, among other books, Couto has been awarded the Camões Prize for Literature and the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among other awards. He was also shortlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. He lives in Maputo, where he works as a biologist.
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