Rainy Season

Description

In Rainy Season, Augualusa returns to the present again, following a journalist who is trying to find out what happened to the Angolan poetess and historian Lidia de Carmo Ferreira. What at first seems like a fictive biography of Ferreira gradually turns out to be a depiction of the devastating history of a country tormented by 30 years of war.

Jose Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo in 1960 and is one of the leading young literary voices from Angola, and from the Portuguese language today. His first book, The Conspiracy, a historical novel set in Sao Paulo de Luanda between 1880 and 1911, paints a fascinating portrait of a society marked by opposites, in which those who can adapt have any chance of success. Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, while The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007. He and his translator, Daniel Hahn, won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award for The General Theory of Oblivion and the novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. In 2019, Agualusa won Angola's most prestigious literary award, the National Prize for Culture and Arts. Agualusa lives on the Island of Mozambique.

It's not just Arcadia, and I, who have a good opinion of this book: it won the Independent's foreign fiction award for this year, against the usual stiff competition' - Nicholas Lezard's paperback choice, Guardian on The Book of Chameleons