A dark literary comedy about an island literary festival that goes horribly - apocalyptically - wrong. By the winner of the Dublin Literary Award.
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Summary
A dark literary comedy about an island literary festival that goes horribly - apocalyptically - wrong. By the winner of the Dublin Literary Award.
Description
"The limitless possibilities of fiction are brilliantly utilised . . . Ingenious" Irish Times
"Agualusa's funny and lively tale turns increasingly ominous ahead of an explosive conclusion" GuardianA Financial Times Fiction in Translation Book of the Year 2023Daniel lives with artist Moira on her native Island of Mozambique. They are awaiting the birth of their child, while also organising the island's first literary festival. But as soon as the first festival guests arrive, the coast is hit by a cyclone.The island is spared, but the bridge to the mainland is left impassable, and telephone and internet connections are severed. The islanders - and the writers who have come for the festival - are cut off from the outside world. Left to their own devices, the authors forge new bonds and make the best of a situation that gets stranger each day. Some believe they're in an intermediate realm, a kind of limbo, and some have no choice but to write, as the boundaries between reality and fiction, past and future, and life and death begin to blur. Where do we go when it's all over? Perhaps to a small island. This is a novel about the nature of life and of time, and the extraordinary power of imagination and the written word, capable of creating anything and regenerating everything.Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel HahnCritic Reviews
The limitless possibilities of fiction are brilliantly utilised in José Eduardo Agualusa's novel The Living and The Rest . . . Ingenious. -- Declan O'Driscoll Irish Times
Agualusa's funny and lively tale turns increasingly ominous ahead of an explosive conclusion. I give it four stars - and a half -- John Self Guardian
Perfect for those who like their beach reads served with a spritz of postmodernism. Strong Words
About the Author
Jose Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo in 1960 and is one of the leading young literary voices from Angola, and from the Portuguese language today. His first book, The Conspiracy, a historical novel set in Sao Paulo de Luanda between 1880 and 1911, paints a fascinating portrait of a society marked by opposites, in which those who can adapt have any chance of success. Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, while The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007. He and his translator, Daniel Hahn, won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award for The General Theory of Oblivion and the novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. In 2019, Agualusa won Angola's most prestigious literary award, the National Prize for Culture and Arts. Agualusa lives on the Island of Mozambique.
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