An illustration of the intimate relationship his work weaves between pasts, experiences, and silences – of winners and losers, of his family and his country.« Le Monde Diplomatique ✼arried by a sublime language, radical in its quest for truth, The Cartographer of Absences is without doubt Mia Couto’s masterpiece. Karin Cherloneix, Ouest France »One is struck by this form that interweaves images of the past and the present, just as one is gripped by Mia Couto’s talent for bringing his characters to life, excavating the truth of paradoxes and conflicts in a beautiful language.« The Cartographer of Absences develops an intrigue with both logical rigor and unexpected surprise, which makes this novel one of the author’s finest works. Today he is living a love story that perhaps would have never become one. Diogo also remembers others who inhabited and enriched his and Mozambique’s past.

From his father he remembers what he experienced with him: two trips to the place of terrible massacres committed by the colonial troops, his persecution and imprisonment by the PIDE, but above all, and throughout all this, his love for poetry. This journey will be above all a return to his past, to his childhood and youth, when Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony.Ī white boy, he is the son of a journalist and, moreover, poet father, and a completely practical and down-to-earth mother.

In Couto’s new novel The Cartographer of Absences (“O Mapeador de Ausências”), Diogo Santiago is a prestigious and respected Mozambican poet and intellectual, professor at the University of Maputo, who returns for the first time in many years to his homeland, the city of Beira, on the eve of the cyclone that devastated it in 2019, in order to receive a tribute that his fellow citizens wish to offer him.

Mia couto rain and other stories