The Cartographer of Absences by Mia Couto ISBN 9780374616328, 0374616329 instant download

The Cartographer of Absences by Mia Couto ISBN 9780374616328, 0374616329 instant download

A haunting novel about a father and son in the waning days of colonial Mozambique by the winner of the 2025 PEN/Nabokov Award
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 persecuted 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,...