Overview

The civil war in Mozambique has ended but still the local soldiers are being hit by the landmines which litter the ground. When United Nations peacekeepers begin to suffer too, a high-level delegation visits the village of Tizangara, to initiate an investigation. Alongside representatives of central government and UN officials is an Italian, Massimo Risi, who has been charged with the business of finding out what happened. Risi s interpreter has collated information for posterity based on taped interviews, letters and witness accounts, documents which form the backbone of this book as he narrates it. Mia Couto is adept at depicting the ways in which his fellow citizens interpret global influences from an African perspective, absorbing them and transforming them in the process. It is this, along with his use of oral storytelling techniques and playful attitude towards language, that give Couto s work its originality and flair.

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9781852428136

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Reviews

?To read Mia Couto is to encounter a peculiarly African sensibility, a writer of fluid, fragmentary narratives? New Statesman ?Mia Couto is a white man with an African soul? Henning Mankell A serious novel that doesn't take itself too seriously. On almost every page of this witty magic realist whodunit, we sense Couto's delight in those places where language slips officialdom's asphyxiating grasp. -- Rob Nixon New York Times Book Review

?To read Mia Couto is to encounter a peculiarly African sensibility, a writer of fluid, fragmentary narratives? New Statesman ?Mia Couto is a white man with an African soul? Henning Mankell A serious novel that doesn't take itself too seriously. On almost every page of this witty magic realist whodunit, we sense Couto's delight in those places where language slips officialdom's asphyxiating grasp. -- Rob Nixon * New York Times Book Review *

Author Information

Mia Couto was born in 1955 in Mozambique and is the most prominent writer in Portuguese-speaking Africa. He has been active as a journalist and for several years headed the AIM news agency in Maputo. He now lives in Maputo where he works as an environmental biologist.

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