Mapped
A General Theory of Oblivion
José Eduardo Agualusa
Luanda on the eve of independence and through the long civil war that follows. A frightened Portuguese woman bricks up her apartment in a grand central building and lives walled in for nearly thirty years, growing food on the terrace while the city churns below. The map holds the old downtown, the bayfront Marginal, the water of the bay and the musseques that ring the city.
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The Book of Chameleons
José Eduardo Agualusa
In a crumbling house in Luanda, Félix Ventura makes his living selling invented pasts and distinguished genealogies to Angola's new bourgeoisie, watched over by the narrator, a gecko on the wall who was once a man. When a stranger buys a whole new identity, the fabricated past collides with the real, violent history of the civil war. Agualusa sets his sly, dreamlike novel in the real Luanda: the decaying villa, the city of the newly powerful, and the buried wartime crimes that surface through the lies.
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