Rainy Season

A journalist - the autobiographical features are quite deliberate - is trying to find out what happened to Lidia, who disappeared in Luanda in 1992, a point in time when the civil war flared up again with unprecedented ferocity after rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA movement refused to accept defeat in the country's first free and democratic elections. The story, a tangled mesh of facts and fiction, tells of the disappointment of the two protagonists, which represents the disappointment of a whole nation.

“It's not just Arcadia, and I, who have a good opinion of this book: it won the Independent's foreign fiction award for this year, against the usual stiff competition' - Nicholas Lezard's paperback choice, Guardian on The Book of Chameleons”

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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