Overview

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.

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9780374616311

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Reviews

""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 ""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

Author Information

Mia Couto, born in Beira, Mozambique, in 1955, is one of the most prominent writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa. Couto has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Camões Prize, and, most recently, the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages. He lives in Maputo, where he works as a biologist. David Brookshaw has translated numerous books by Mia Couto, including The Drinker of Horizons, The Sword and the Spear, Woman of the Ashes, Confession of the Lioness, The Tuner of Silences, A River Called Time, and Sleepwalking Land.

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