Mia Couto, born in Beira, Mozambique, in 1955, is one of the most prominent writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa. After studying medicine and biology in Maputo, he worked as a journalist and headed several Mozambican national newspapers and magazines. Couto has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Camões Prize (the most prestigious Portuguese-language award), the Prémio Vergílio Ferreira, the Prémio União Latina de Literaturas Românicas, the FIL Literary Prize in Romance Languages, and, most recently, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. He lives in Maputo, where he works as a biologist.

David Brookshaw is a professor emeritus at the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. He has translated numerous books by Mia Couto, including The Cartographer of Absences, The Drinker of Horizons, The Sword and the Spear, Woman of the Ashes, Confession of the Lioness, The Tuner of Silences, A River Called Time, and Sleepwalking Land.

"Revelatory . . . [The Cartographer of Absences is] a mystery and a love story, an aching, dreamlike immersion into the violent absurdities and racism of Portuguese colonialism in Africa . . . Yet there's beauty here, too, in the writing and in the humanity of those surviving in such a world . . . The narrative thickens, layer upon layer, into a foreboding that feels anxiously fresh."
--Carl Hoffman, The Washington Post

"In its temporally fragmented structure and use of found documents, Mia Couto's newly translated novel feels like a new direction for him. It's also an intensely powerful work about revolution, compromise, and long-buried secrets--one that both explores Mozambique's troubled colonial history and raises big questions about ideals and sacrifice. A haunting, compelling book."
--Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"In the rich latest from Couto, a poet reckons with the colonial history of Mozambique . . . Revelations of murder and suicide shade the final act, which is made all the more gripping by a cyclone bearing down on the country. This packs a punch."
--Publishers Weekly

"Couto's storytelling is rich, while delivering a straightforward message: 'When a regime starts arresting poets it is because that regime has lost its way' . . . A contemplative study of colonialism's collapse, and its enduring legacy."
--Kirkus Reviews

"We finish this haunting and perceptive novel aware that memory or bearing witness might not be the only essential ingredients in coming to terms with the past."
--World Literature Today