Imprint: Arcadia
Format: C Format
ISBN: 978-1-905147-78-6
Price: £ 11.99
Pages: 382 pp
Date: June 2008
‘A work of fierce originality, vindicating the power of creativity to transform the most sinister acts. His writing is brought vividly home to us by Daniel Hahn’ – Amanda Hopkinson, The Independent on The Book of Chameleons
‘Ingenious, consistently taut and witty’ – TLS on The Book of Chameleons
‘“A beautiful fiction”. It has grace, agility, wit, a lovely inventiveness’
– Boyd Tonkin, The Independent on The Book of Chameleons
‘A poetic, beguiling meditation on truth and storytelling and a political thriller and a wholly satisfying murder mystery’ – New Internationalist on The Book of Chameleons
‘Daniel Hahn’s translation marks a fascinating English debut for José Eduardo Agualusa. Creole captivates with picaresque adventure and … evocative impressions’– Maya Jaggi, The Guardian on Creole
‘Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa plays an elaborate literary game in this prize-winning novel. Intriguing and skilfully depicted’ – Metro on Creole
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My Father's Wives
José-Eduardo Agualusa (About this author)
Daniel Hahn (Portugese)
Longlisted for the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Upon his death, the famous Angolan composer Faustino Manso left seven widows and eighteen children. His youngest daughter, Laurentina, a filmmaker, tries to reconstruct the late musician’s turbulent life.
In My Father’s Wives, reality and fiction run side by side, the former feeding into the latter. However, in the territories José Eduardo Agualusa crosses, fiction plays a part in reality too. The four characters in the novel which the author is writing as he travels accompany him from Luanda, the Angolan capital to Benguela and Namibe. They cross the Namibian sands and their ghost towns, reaching Cape Town. They carry on to Maputo, then Quelimane beside the Bon Sinais River, and thence to the island of Mozambique. They cross landscapes that border dreams, landscapes from which – here and there – the strangest characters emerge. My Father’s Wives is a novel about women, music and magic. These pages herald the rebirth of Africa, a continent afflicted by terrible problems but blessed with a talent for music, by the ever-renewed strength of its women and the secret power of ancient gods.
More Books by this Author:
Creole
My Father\'s Wives
Rainy Season
The Book Of Chameleons
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